


Whatever I Am

by DreamerWisherLiar



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angry Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blow Jobs, Complicated Relationships, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, Episode Fix-it, Episode Tag, F/M, Gratuitous Smut, Hand Jobs, Infidelity, Lots of Sex, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mostly Canon Compliant, Mutual Masturbation, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Past Rape/Non-con, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Relationship Negotiation, Rope Bondage, Rough Sex, Spanking, Unhealthy Relationships, ending not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-06-10 16:00:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 48,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15295026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerWisherLiar/pseuds/DreamerWisherLiar
Summary: "You're enjoying this," he whispers, horrified realisation in his voice.“Oh, you’re one to talk,” she hisses back, trying to force her suddenly uneven breaths to calm, but she’s still flushed and he can see her eyes dilate further. “Unless you’re claiming that’s your pistol?”Basically, these will be a series of non-canonical episode tags from 2x04 onwards, basically just showing Athos and Milady having a lot of (angsty, rough and quite angry) sexytimes. Because why not?





	1. 2x04: In the Marketplace

**Author's Note:**

> For the seven people probably still in this fandom (I only just got into this pairing, I know I'm a bit late). I haven't written smut often before, so be nice, please.

“Whatever I am, you love me. And you always will.”

He should leave, not stand there stunned by the impact of those words, breathless under their weight. He should have left before she said it at all. But that’s the way it is with her, he tries to leave, to walk away, to stop her from destroying him with her words and her scent and her smirk, but always he ends up trapped by her. Frozen under that green gaze like a mouse hypnotised by a snake. His body is tight with hatred and arousal and the bitter, twisted remnants of the love she mocks him with, his skin prickling and his heartbeat thrumming and his breath painful and sharp. He should have left the moment he first saw her – and even as he has the thought, he doesn’t know if he means the moment he saw her in the marketplace just now or the moment he first saw her all those years ago.

She gives him that little, triumphant smirk that makes rage thrum through him, igniting the desire to wreck her like she always manages to wreck him, and then steps around him to continue walking, followed by the man holding all her boxes. She walks airily, lightly, as if this was a conversation about the weather or the price of fruit, easily discussed and equally as easily abandoned. And she brushes herself against the side of his arm as she does so, despite all the space in the street, arching her body ever so slightly to press herself into him briefly like a satisfied cat. He can feel the warmth of her for that split second, every adored, memorised curve of her body within reach for one agonising and endless moment, and then she’s gone.

He breathes. He blinks. He tries not to think about what she said, about the way the simple words hit him, slicing deeper than any lie or manipulation should be able to. He tries not to think at all. But staring off into the distance he can’t see the marketplace at all, only those taunting green eyes, that cruel little curve to the side of her mouth, the long dark braid that once upon a time he would have playfully twisted around his hand while they lay side by side and whispered secrets like the lovers they were.

And then something within him snaps. Before he can pull himself back to rational thought, the rage is there, that terrible aching anger at her lies and her games and her cruelty. Besides wine, the rage was the only thing that kept him warm in the darkness against all the terrible grief and guilt of those long five years. How dare she, he thinks. _How dare she._

He whirls and stalks after her, striding through the marketplace with absolute indifference to the obstacles in his way. He pushes the palace servant roughly out of the way as he passes him and the man stumbles, falling: Athos doesn’t stop and he doesn’t care. Milady doesn’t look back but she must sense he’s following her: her lazy glide turns into more of a hurried step and she takes an abrupt turn into a small alleyway, losing the man she’s using as her packhorse but failing to lose him, which is assuredly not her intention. He follows her into the little alley and before he can stop himself Athos has her by the arm, fingers nearly tight enough to bruise, and he’s yanking her around to face him and crowding her into the wall, ignoring her startled exclamation.

“If you ever say something like that to me again, I’ll kill you,” he says, voice low and thick with hatred. He doesn’t care if the man from the palace catches up, in that moment. He doesn’t care if the King hears of this, if he’s punished for this. The world has narrowed to just her, the way it always does. _Damn_ her.

“Like I haven’t heard that before,” she spits up at him, struggling against his grip but still somehow mocking him. “Having trouble keeping your promises, lately, aren’t you?”

The darkest, deepest part of him – the place where he stores all the futile rage he can never quite express fully – wants nothing more than to shut her up. He tightens his grip to the point where it must be painful but still she looks at him like she’s winning and he’s losing, a smirk playing across her mouth even as she winces. Her voice does something to him, it always has. Her voice and her eyes and her mouth and her body and every part of her, really, every damn part, like she was sent from Hell specifically to torment him. 

Athos pushes her back against the brickwork roughly, crowding her in with his body, wanting nothing more than to see that smirk disappear for a second, just a second. He wants back that dark little moment of satisfaction as he’d watched her speed up her step to get away – no longer the predator but the prey. He craves another little victory more than wine, more than anything. He wants to dent that mask of smug self-assurance she wears so constantly. He wants her scared because God knows he’s terrified. Whether it’s of her or of himself when he’s around her… well, he’s never been able to figure that one out. 

She draws in a quick little breath, almost a gasp, and for a second he thinks she’s actually afraid and the beast inside him snarls in triumph. But then he sees the flush brightening her cheeks, the way her eyes have darkened, and he puts it together with how her breathing has quickened and realises it’s just the opposite. He’s grabbed her hard enough to bruise and threatened to kill her and pushed her against the wall like he plans to go through with it, and his once-beloved wife is red with lust, panting against him like the whore he now knows her to be. 

“You’re _enjoying_ this,” he whispers, horrified realisation in his voice. 

He presses into her in response before he can stop himself, wanting more of her heat and her harsh breathing, more of _everything_. He thinks he can almost smell the arousal on her, the scent as immediately and heartbreakingly familiar as that of the forget-me-nots in her hair or the jasmine scent of her body, and just as devastating. It’s like she’s struck him again, sent him reeling, and he nearly chokes as she lets out a shaky breath that undoes him.

“Oh, you’re one to talk,” she hisses back, trying to force her suddenly uneven breaths to calm, but she’s still flushed and he can see her eyes dilate further. “Unless you’re claiming that’s your pistol?”

That’s when he realises just how much his body is reacting to their closeness. He’s hard against her hip, achingly so, and her half-hearted struggles against his grip aren’t helping. He lets out a choked groan of need and then he’s grinding against her furiously, desperately, forcing her even harder against the roughness of the wall, every little thrust sending another sharp bolt of lust singing through his body. She yanks clumsily at his collar to force him to down into a messy, angry kiss, her nails digging into the thick fabric, twisting it. Her urgency sends an even more debilitating jolt of heat through him that burns away any lingering thoughts of resisting this madness.

 _I can’t touch you while you’re the King’s mistress_ , he’d said, but apparently he can. He shouldn’t – Christ in Heaven, he shouldn’t – but he can and so he does.

He releases his angry grip on her upper arm but only to slide it down to her hip and squeeze almost as cruelly. His other hand is buried in her hair although he can’t remember ever making the decision to move it there. He invades her mouth with no restraint, devouring her like a starving man – and he has been starving, starving for the taste of her mouth and her breasts and her cunt, starving for the feel of her body, the sound of her whimpers. He bites at her bottom lip and she lets out a moan that would be indecent in a bedroom, let alone a little alleyway near a market, and he is so hard now it is actually painful. He rocks against all the soft warmth of her again anyway just to feel the rush of it. His hands roam all over her, unable to settle, wanting to claim everything, pulling fruitlessly at her clothes.

“My God,” she gasps out when he moves his mouth the pale skin just below her ear instead, biting and licking at it with single-minded want, sucking her earlobe into his mouth and releasing it with a strangely lewd, wet noise, and her hand moves from his collar to the bare skin of his neck to try to and keep him there, her nails close to drawing blood as she arches into him again. “ _Christ_ , don’t stop.” She struggles to force her other arm between their bodies, pulling desperately at the ties to his trousers. She is more successful than he is with her bodice and before he can brace himself in any way her hot little hand is grasping at his cock, squeezing and pulling until his mind is nothing but exclamation points and animal need.

He thinks he swears, lets out a few broken curses. He knows he groans again, thrusting against her clever, thieving fingers as she moves her wrist in a way that makes him see stars. She’s always known how to reduce him to nothing with just the right angle and pressure. It’s impossible to concentrate through the haze of lust but even so he knows what he needs. Not that he can ever really have all of it, not when it comes to her.

He needs to touch her, needs to know if she’s as wet as he thinks she is: it’s mixed in with all the other messy, stupid desires that swim in his fevered mind. He wants to force her to her knees and finish in her mouth. He wants to sink to his own knees and taste her like he used to, lick into her until she loses her mind. He wants to bury himself in her body until there’s nothing but the raw heat of it. He wants to claim her, take her, use her, drive her out of her mind, then do it all again: he wants her every way. He’s never had any limits when it came to her and it seems that in this one way, his hatred is not so very different from his love. He laves his tongue against the sweaty hollow just below her ear as he shoves mindlessly into the tight circle of her hand and he hears her whimper, and if he was capable of coherent thoughts, maybe he would realise that for them there is in fact no difference between love and hate at all.

Even with the serious distraction of her hand pumping his cock as if to make him come right then, he manages to pull her layered skirts up and aside and then his hand is against her hot, wet cunt, returning the favour. He presses his calloused fingers, shaking with need, against her clit, rubbing and circling as she seemingly loses her mind entirely and tries to pull him closer and away at the same time, hips stuttering as he plays with her, her hand loosening on his cock as his movement distracts her. She is drenched with need and he is impossibly hard and she lets her head drop back against the wall and moans at the sky when he pulls her up higher and fits himself inside her, raising her legs and tightening them around his waist even as she clenches around his cock with need. Then she tips her head forward again to bury her face in his shoulder, whimpering and moaning and gasping against his skin as he pushes into her, trapped between the wall and the feel of him invading her. Her hands are at his back now, urging him on. “Harder,” she says in his ear, and her voice is a broken and needy whine, and he obeys, blood seething. “Please, oh, oh, please, _oh_ …”

It should feel alien and wrong after so long, after so much between them. The warm wet clench of her should not feel like coming home. But despite the wildness of the moment, the stupidity of it all, of this insane alleyway encounter in the middle of the day between two people who despise each other, that’s what it does feel like. Deep inside the core of her, the sun beating on his back, the urgent rhythm of their bodies matching their pounding heartbeats – it feels like Pinon. They coupled like animals in the meadow then, unashamed of their lust because it wasn’t just lust, after all, it was love, and they felt like it was something they alone had discovered, something they owned. Something only they understood.

He’s damned if he understands it now, but when she squeezes around him like that, he doesn’t care.

He slams into her with a brutality he’ll be ashamed of later, keeping her trapped between him and the unforgiving wall, savage in his lust and need, wild with wanting her even as he has her. She comes first, the rhythm of her desperate rocking against him turning unsteady, her breathing becoming so ragged and harsh that it’s nearly louder than her moans. His memories haven’t done it justice, the hot squeezing tightness of her cunt around him, the sharpness of her little white teeth sunk into his clothed shoulder hard enough to bruise even through the fabric as she fights her way through the bone-shaking pleasure of it all, the unrestrained and broken noise she moans into the dampness her mouth has already left there, the desperate and uncontrolled way her hands yank at him, wanting “More, more, _God_ , don’t stop now, _more_ you bastard, _more_. _Please_.”

Her voice is a sob but he thinks his voice is broken entirely, rumbling up from the very core of him in grunts and groans as he jerks against her, suddenly serving no rhythm again, just chasing the elusive agony and ecstasy he’s never been able to touch since the last time he was lodged deep within her. He pounds into her, into the throbbing centre of her as she breaks around him, his Anne, his wife, his enemy, his soul-mate, his victim, his everything. And then he’s shattering too, the world all but turning white with the force of the pleasure, everything disappearing except for the feel of her. He has been too long without the touch of her and his orgasm is as relentless and overwhelming as a tidal wave, leaving him shaken and gasping and not sure which way is up or down, only sure that he has somehow survived the tumult of it, stunned and winded but alive. Every muscle aches with a pleasure that is worse than pain and his mind is awash with confusion and lust and that very particular madness only she can induce.

His movements slow gradually at the end until he is not thrusting at all, just staying still and unmoving within her, mind blown. The tidal wave has passed by and left only a peculiar mixture of self-hatred and overwhelming pleasure, and he drops his head against the wall next to hers with a sigh that seems torn from his soul.

She’s the one who moves first, of course. “Get off me,” she orders. Her autocratic tone is not nearly as intimidating now that her voice is shaking and raw, he thinks. Every cell in his body screams at him to stay there pressing her against the wall, inside her, as if she is the only warm thing in a frozen world and he must stay as close as he can or freeze to death, but he moves back anyway, disentangling himself from her with an effort. When he tries to help her loosen her legs from their vice grip around his waist and slide back to the ground she slaps his hands away pettishly. “I’m fine,” she snaps, but it takes her two tries to get the words out, and if it’s a mask for some reason, it’s a convincing one. He moves back further so that no part of them is touching now.

She slumps against the wall, facing him, looking more exhausted than he’s ever seen her, and more shaken. She tries to pull her clothes back together without looking down, eyes still focused on him.

Athos, meanwhile, tries to pull his mind back together, without nearly as much success. It’s easy to clean up the evidence of what he has just done, tucking himself away, running his hand quickly through his mussed hair, rubbing his sleeve against the mouth she reddened with her fierce kisses – he’s a drunk, after all. Messy clothes and an air of general dishevelment won’t raise any eyebrows, especially not right now. His mental state, on the other hand, is not so easily fixed. He can feel everywhere she touched him like old bruises, even where the touches were only through his clothing, and he thinks if he could only lean back into her the ache would disappear.

“Your man will catch up in a moment,” Athos says instead, after checking both ends of the little alleyway. It’s a marvel the man hasn’t turned up yet: even more a marvel that no one else took a shortcut through here and found them, though at least a stranger would be more likely to jeer or threaten to throw a bucket of water on them than to report their misconduct to the King.

“I know that,” she snaps, struggling to restore her hair to order. It’s the clearest giveaway to what they have just done. She has some red marks on her neck but they don’t look likely to bruise – despite their combined fierceness, he had moved his mouth and hands too much in his desperation to touch every available inch of her skin to mark any particular place for long.

Actually, maybe the clearest giveaway is the expression in her vibrant eyes. She looks as stunned as he thinks he probably does.

He just fucked the King’s mistress in an alleyway in broad daylight. His wife. His wife just cheated on the man she is mistress to with her husband, now there’s an absurdity. But everything about this is absurd now that the madness has subsided somewhat – the sunlight, the noise of the nearby crowd, the knowledge there is a palace servant probably only feet away, all things any normal couple would probably have taken into consideration. Even more absurd, the aftermath, that now he is exchanging awkward conversation with a murderess he’d like to murder and who he has just taken roughly against a wall.

And the greatest absurdity: he would like to pull her against him again, press a kiss to the top of her hair, feel the thrum of her heartbeat matching to his as they slow, listen to her soft breathing as she leans into him the way she always used to. He would like to hold her.

“I should go.”

And again, that sneer, but now he can see the cracks to it, the near-panic in her eyes. “No, you think?”

He gives a terse nod, as if that’s any kind of reply, and walks away too fast to hear any further comments she might make. She will not call him back, he knows that, but in his current mood he would take even the nastiest jibe as a reason to remain in her orbit, and who knows what mad thing she would provoke him to next?

He might try to kill her again. He might try to kiss her again. He might spew out every hate-filled thought he’s stored inside himself, might shake her so violently her teeth rattle, might hold her so gently he cracks his own heart open.

He might tell her she’s right.


	2. 2x05: Palace Encounters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Athos runs into Milady in the Louvre.

Milady finds it hard to concentrate in the weeks that follow. It is, after all, somewhat distracting. Thought provoking, even. In the span of a few days, she was given a necklace worth a lord’s ransom by a King, was threatened with death, was blackmailed, assassinated a man only feet from a guard of Musketeers, and fucked the man who nearly killed her. 

The last, perhaps, should not be the most earth-shaking, but in truth, blackmail and assassinations are things she has experience with, whereas she’s had half a decade to forget the feeling of Athos deep inside her. If she had a diary, it would be positively overflowing with emotions. Since she does not, and since emotions in general are not her specialty, she keeps her thoughts inside. She suppresses her confused memories of him roughly pounding into her, of her own embarrassing and uncontained need for him.

They rear up at the most inopportune of times, though. When she sees the dress she was wearing that day in the market, or any of the purchases she made that day. When she is in the King’s lap and he fumbles at her and she closes her eyes and pictures another man and gasps from the force of her memories. And especially when she is making her way silently through the halls and overhears a conversation between Constance and D’Artagnan – her asking where they all disappeared to for the past week, and his reply, “Athos’s estate. Long story.”

Athos’s estate, as if no one ever lived there but him. But then, she did burn it down, which is a pretty unambiguous way to renounce all ownership of a home, so perhaps she can understand that. 

She rounds a corner and nearly crashes into him, and she knows exactly which him it is before she raises her eyes, just from the quickening of her breath. She could always do that. She feels him in the goose bumps that appear on her skin and the hair that rises on her neck and the way her blood seems to heat with rage. In her time with the Cardinal, it had helped immensely, letting her know when it was time to duck out of sight before the Musketeers clattered into the place. Now, it is just another way he is invading her peace. And since she did, in fact, assassinate a man only a few feet from him while wearing a veil that frankly did not conceal much, she can be reasonably sure this effect isn’t mutual. She hates that as well, as useful as it is.

“Milady,” he says stiffly, hand going to his sword.

“Oh, good,” she says woodenly. “You.”

He touches a hand to his hat in a mockery of politeness and goes to stride past her, but this time she’s the one who stops him, placing a hand on his arm and tightening it so he can’t keep moving without dragging her along behind him.

“Is this us as strangers, Athos?”

He visibly grinds his teeth, trying to shake her loose without appearing to do so. She can feel the swell of muscle under her hand and finds her mouth is dry. “I suppose that depends whether you dare to touch strangers in such an improper way.” His words are a warning. She won’t heed them.

She raises an eyebrow at him. As always, she’s unable to stop herself from pushing him further. “Touching people improperly is my specialty, as it happens, strangers or not.”

“I think the world’s aware of that,” he grits out. The tension crackles between them, almost visible in its intensity.

Now Milady lets her other eyebrow rise as well. “Is that jealousy, Athos, or merely disapproval? As I recall, you gave out some improper touches of your own the other day.”

“Here?” Athos says, incredulous, lowering his voice and glancing around the hallway. “You bring this up _here_?”

She shrugs negligently, although she agrees with him that she’s being a fool. She stands to lose everything from what they did in that alley, and yet she throws it at him recklessly in a palace that gossip flows through like a sieve. But Milady de Winter is as addicted to the threat of death and the edge of steel as she is to him, and the taste of ruin is close enough to be an acceptable substitute for all of those on occasion.

“I hear you’ve been back in Pinon recently,” she comments lightly, changing the subject.

His eyes narrow suspiciously. “And where did you hear that?”

“A lady never tells.” 

“Well, it’s good that you’re no lady.” He finally peels her fingers off his arm, taking no care to be gentle. It sparks something inside her anyway. Of course it does. All his actions do. 

Probably he’s wondering now if she still has spies and sources, if something of the Cardinal’s network has even now survived. Has he not realised yet that everyone overhears everything here? It is just that kind of place. If it hadn’t been her hearing Constance and D’Artagnan, it would have been someone else, and the resulting garbled gossip would have reached her eventually. The actions of the most famous Musketeers are always a topic of interest in the Louvre. Especially Aramis, although Milady can’t pretend to understand the appeal there.

“Does my ghost still linger there?” Milady asks.

His outburst is unexpected. “Damn you, of course it does. Do you think knowing you’re alive changes what that place means to me? I see you in every room and every fucking field, just as I see Thomas, just I see the ghost of who I was. All of them haunt me.”

“Actually, I just wondered if the villagers believed my soul walks the streets of Pinon searching for vengeance or some such thing, but thank you for the clarification.”

“No, instead your body walks the streets of Paris looking for vengeance, and you have no soul. Can we never just be done?”

“Until we are both dead,” she says quietly, a savagery in her voice she can’t stem. “I promised you that. I don’t always lie, whatever you think. Whatever you hope.”

“I have no hope, and you did that as well,” he says with the same savageness. 

“Always so dramatic, Athos.” She rolls her eyes, lowers her voice, steps closer to him. “Once upon a time, when you got in a mood, I would have slid to my knees and _forced_ you to forget your problems, do you remember?” By the end of the sentence, her voice is a low purr, and she can see its effect on him. “And you were always more than willing to see to my own needs in repayment.”

He inhales sharply, muscles trembling as he fights to control himself. She doesn’t know whether he would rather kiss her or hit her. Perhaps he doesn’t either. “What you _need_ , madame, is a soul, or a priest, or perhaps a more efficient executioner,” he spits, “None of those are things I can give you.”

“None of those is what you _want_ to give me, either,” she says, still wicked.

She’s playing with fire in more than one way, but the flames are rather beautiful. There is a voice in the back of her head reminding her that her priority is to survive, to avoid the grime of the gutter and the stink of the whorehouse, to do whatever is necessary to stay in these beautiful halls and the room with the garden view and the bed with silky sheets. Normally, that voice is the loudest. But when she is with Athos, there is a louder voice, one which wonders if it might not be better just to burn. She is, after all, something of an expert at rising from the ashes.

Milady glances quickly back and forth. There is still no one within sight. She reaches out, runs a hand down his chest, feels the strangled gasp he gives her vibrate against her palm, lets her hand fall to the front of his pants. He’s hard and straining against her fingers as she cups and squeezes through the fabric, and when she lets go, she sees his eyes are shut tight and his fists are clenched. If they were anywhere else, she would probably find herself against a wall again, being roughly pounded into madness, and the thought is far too appealing.

“Follow me,” she says, her voice husky with lust, or perhaps just stupidity.

To her surprise, he does. He walks behind her like a dog on a leash as she strides through the halls. People do not glance at them twice, accustomed to the King’s favourite wandering the halls with some lackey accompanying her. A Musketeer guard is new, but why would anyone question it? The King is so infatuated with her and so dismissive of the Musketeers she could probably demand a regiment at her back. Picturing their faces if she did so makes her smirk.

And then they are in the room with the garden view (but the curtains are drawn) and next to the bed with the silky sheets (but they are mussed from earlier) and the world is shut out and she is a fool, an absolute fool. Someone sees everything in the Louvre, she knows that, and she already has Rochefort blackmailing her, she hardly needs more people with information on her. The last person in the world she should bring to this room is her husband. But there is the bed, with its silky sheets, and there is her husband, prowling around the room like a caged panther, teeth all but bared in helpless fury, and once again she has lost her mind.

Milady puts two hands against his chest and pushes him towards the bed, pushing again and again as he hesitates, frowns, stands firm and resistant. Strength of arms isn’t her forte, and obstinacy is his, so she gets nowhere. Losing patience, she grabs the front of his shirt and goes up on her toes, drawing him into a kiss that is more teeth than tongue, and then he gives a muffled groan against her mouth and finally allows her to corral him against the bed with her soft shoves. When the backs of his thighs hit the edge of it she bites his lower lip once more and then releases it to push him into a seated position.

“What are we doing? _Why_ are we doing this?” he mutters disbelievingly, but he doesn’t make any move to get up and she knows he’s going nowhere.

“Must I draw you a battle plan?” she murmurs in response to his first question, because she has no response for his second one. She wants to lift her skirts and clamber into his lap but instead she leans forward again, kissing him fiercely. She works on his shirt as the kiss builds and builds, the heat within them swirling in time with the movement of lips and tongue and teeth, and by the time she pulls back to breathe his shirt is half-off him and she has skin to explore.

She hasn’t kissed his chest in years and she finds it an unfamiliar landscape, hard muscle and scar tissue and burns where once there was only smooth skin and light hair. The noises he makes are the same, though, and the sharp inhalation she hears as her hands and mouth travel further downwards is as recognisable to her as her own breathing.

“Up here, now,” he growls, but she is already tugging his trousers down a little and lifting out his cock. He grips her wrists in strong hands and tries to tug her up, probably to guide her into his lap, but she ignores him like always. She can feel her heartbeat thumping hard between her thighs as well as in her chest, but she doesn’t want to ride him, not yet, not when she can reduce him to a pathetic mess with her tongue and listen to him curse her for it first.

Her wrists are trapped but her mouth is free, and its easy enough to slide to her knees fully and take him in her mouth. His hands tighten around her wrists to the point of pain as she swirls her tongue around the head, and she savours the feel of it. She licks and tastes him in the ways she knows take him to the edge, then pulls away until she nearly lets him go, then starts again. His body tenses and settles by turns, like a bowstring being drawn taut and then relaxed, over and over again, but never being fired.

Her tongue stroking at him, finding the spots she knows undo him. Her mouth hot on him, her lips swollen and red around him, inching up and down him but never quite taking him fully in or letting him fully out. Her eyes fixed on his so that he can’t look away, forced to let every spasm of need and pleasure play out across his face for her enjoyment. It would take a stronger man even than him to resist falling into the moment and the pleasure that awaits.

“I hate you,” Athos says, gasping as if she’s sucking his breath out through his cock. He lets out a noise that’s nearly a whimper, eyes sliding closed as he struggles not to thrust up into the warm heat of her mouth. She draws back yet again to watch him slump a little, trying to catch his breath, then takes him deep again before he expects her to. “I hate you so much. How can this feel so _good_?”

She knows her response will infuriate him, but that’s another thing she’s never been able to resist, especially when he’s angered her recently as well. She pulls back just enough that she can speak around his cock, deliberately smug gaze meeting his, and says, “I’ve had a lot of practice.” The words are mangled a little by her mouth being full, but understandable, and she flicks her gaze meaningfully to the rumpled bedsheets as she says it. His eyes narrow in sudden anger.

Athos at his most dangerous is, unfortunately, also Athos at his most attractive. That she feels like that may explain why she has come so close to death so many times, why she has become so addicted to it.

But then, he is the same: what they feel for each other, confusing and overwhelming and senseless as it is, is only rivalled by their shared fascination with the idea of dying, a fascination that began with a necklace made of rope and their eyes meeting across a field. They are _now kill me, and do a better job of it this time_ , they are _shoot, damn you!_ , and always, always, they are the tangled longing for _Perhaps it’s better it ends like this_. If she dies in his arms, well, she’s had worse deaths, and so has he. And if the death is a little death… well, so much the better.

“You bitch,” he says, and he moves quickly, making it so that her wrists are now held tightly behind her back in one hand, his other hand left free to fist in her hair. He uses the grip to force her to take him deeper, and he shudders at the tightness as he invades her throat. “You fucking _bitch_. You had him like this, just now? And dragged me in here after?”

Milady can’t breathe with him so deep, let alone answer, but she gives one hard suck at his cock anyway in response, making him curse in something close to pain.

“Oh, _fuck_. Fuck you.” Another rough thrust, and he’s fucking her throat in earnest now, an invading force, aggressive in his anger and lust. He isn’t quite rough enough for her to gag – Athos is the only man she knows who somehow sees himself as both more and less capable of violence than he is – but it takes all her concentration to stop her throat from contracting. She thinks her lust has probably soaked through her dress at this point, and she can’t regret it. She also can’t breathe, but that’s another thing she’s had a lot of practice with. 

She tries to open herself more and drag him deeper to finish him off before she starts suffocating, but instead he pulls out without ceremony, leaving her empty and dizzy. She draws deep lungfuls of air into her aching throat, bending over herself as her eyes water and her body shudders with it. When she’s gained enough presence of mind to look up at him again he’s stroking himself with his free hand and watching her, back in control.

“There’s never enough for you, is there?” he says savagely, and there’s enough truth in it to make her mute. “Money, jewels, men… you pull the world towards you like a whirlpool, devouring everything your path. God knows you devoured me.”

And what did he do to her, back then? That’s the question he never, ever asks, because to ask it would be to admit that neither de la Fere brother was an innocent. She was never a snake in Eden. She was never even Eve. In the Bible, if she is anyone, she is Esther, who had beauty but no power, who lived on a knife’s edge, who saved up her truths because she knew silence would serve her better, and who finally fell to her knees and begged her husband to save her with no hope he would. But Esther at least was listened to.

She surges up again, trying to move against him, trying to sit astride him, but instead he catches her hips and rolls them both so that she is lost in the silky sheets that somehow smell of royalty and degradation all at once. But the smell is lost on her – instead, she smells leather, horses, wine and sweat, inhaling it sharply as he kisses at her neck. The smell goes straight to her core, as always, and if she wasn’t already wet and wanting, she would be. And then he rucks up her skirts and his hand finds her wetness and her head falls sideways and she moans into the sheets.

“Quite the day you’re having,” he drawls, and Christ, the things that drawl does to her system. He’s so hard against her thigh she thinks he’s about to burst but you wouldn’t know it from that dry tone. “The King and I, perhaps only minutes apart. Tell me, did he touch you like this?” His fingers don’t get harder against her clit, exactly, but they are confident and firm – he remembers how to make her mindless in bare moments, he remembers exactly how she likes to be touched just as she remembered for him. She thinks of Pinon and La Fere, and a girl with shining eyes, and a boy who would have done anything for a taste of her, and a field of blue flowers; and she hates herself for it. Will they ever be able to fuck without the ghosts of themselves as voyeurs?

“Answer me!” he demands, but his hands are too clever and his body is too near, and whatever she gasps out as she comes, it isn’t an answer.

At least not to this question: it’s an answer to his earlier one. Why is she doing this? Athos, Athos, always Athos. They had fallen in love so hard they left an imprint in the ground – he walked away, but she lay in the crater, and somehow she had never left it. She is still there, dazed and stunned and ruined, moaning as her body surges against his, lips unable to even shape a plea for more even when it is all she wants, feeling as if she has been picked up and shaken by a force so much greater than herself. She has no control over her hands as they dig into him, her voice as it breaks into ragged moans. She has no control of herself at all.

It’s base and humiliating, what he can do for her, what he can do to her. No one else ever could. Milady is used to begging for her life and for whatever other scraps she can garner, but begging for pleasure is something she had only ever done with him, with her husband. In some ways, pleasure in general is something she has only done with him. All other enjoyments are sour and thin, bitter crusts of bread she survives on, but her time with him was a feast and when she is near him her mouth waters and her stomach contracts with the painful memory of being full.

And then he moves, replacing his too-knowing fingers with his cock as she writhes, and she’s full yet again. It’s not rough, it’s worse than that, it’s steady and inexorable and unstoppable as the tides, dragging out her orgasm and forcing her into a second before she has time even to gather herself. He’s deep inside her, pushing into the heated core of her, sliding again and again against the place that is responsive enough before she’s come but almost agonising in its sensitivity afterwards. She tries to wriggle away from the ever-rising sensation, scrambling to escape the overwhelming nature of it, squirming and whimpering and pushing toward and away all at once, lost in the madness of the moment, but his hands are on her hips keeping her there, milking every last drop of pleasure out of her, forcing her to feel it all. 

When she comes a third time she is only vaguely aware of him following her with a stifled blasphemy, his thrusts becoming rough and uneven, his gasps and moans against her neck, his hands tightening on her. Her vision has all but whited out and sight and sound are useless, nothing existing but the uncontrollable arch of her body against him, the shattering need that leaves her wrung out and ruined.

They lie still after for a long time, until eventually he pulls himself out of her and rolls onto his back beside her, staring at the ceiling like a man destroyed.

“Why are we _doing_ this,” he says again, and this time it doesn’t sound like a question, it sounds like a lament.

She truly doesn’t know. Is all this love and lust and hatred purely for the people he says are now gone? Does she want a memory more than she wants him? She doesn’t think so. It would be nice and neat to say that the girl who dried flowers and the man who chased her through a meadow are dead, and that what they feel now is only grief and shadows, but that’s not the truth. The truth is that back then they both held the seeds of who they are now, and they may be plants that grew in blood-soaked soil, but they still grew twisted around each other. The truth is that the version of her she is now would not trade the man who curses her for the man who idealised her, and she doesn’t think this new, harder Athos would trade the woman who threatens to kill him for the girl who said she’d die without him. Whatever they are, dark and wrong and strange, they are still something true in a world of lies, if only he could see it.

“Why not,” she says instead, sliding off the bed and starting to tidy herself up. “Get dressed, would you, and be quick about it. You never know who might come by.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This pairing is weirdly addictive. I have the feeling I'm going to end up writing like five long stories about them in the space of a month and then passing out from lack of sleep.


	3. Between 2x05 and 2x06: An Angsty Interlude

It’s a pretty scene, and Athos hates it. Perhaps that’s because the sunshine and the scent of flowers drags him back to his dreams like he never woke. Perhaps it’s because his head still pounds from last night’s combination of alcohol and disturbed sleep. But most likely, it’s because he’s watching his wife flirt with the other man she’s fucking, and he’s powerless to do anything about it.

She has a fan in front of her face, teasingly lowering it to make eyes at the King, but she may as well not be bothering because as far as Athos can see the man hasn’t raised his eyes from her breasts since he sat down. Ostensibly, Athos is here guarding the King, because Treville wants them to have more of a _presence_ at the palace, whatever that means, and even though he isn’t captain anymore, everyone still obeys like he is. In theory protecting the King means Athos should spend his time looking for outside threats, but he’s formed the opinion that if Louis is attacked the danger is most likely to be one of the women near him. His wife has more experience as an assassin, but the Queen looks like she has more motive, so it’s even odds. Right now Athos can’t bring himself to care too much about His Majesty’s chances.

He hadn’t slept at all the night before, not real sleep, anyway. He lurched into and out of dreams both good and bad. Some dreams were pretty, perfumed memories from times long gone, and he woke from them with tears in his eyes. Some were corpses, and blood, and knives, and rope, and he woke from those thrashing and wrapped in blankets, trying to fight off ghosts with his hands and fists. The rest, unfortunately, were hot memories from times much more recent, and he woke from them slicked with sweat, hard and hating himself for it, wanting to reach out for the woman who no longer slept beside him. Disturbed dreams are nothing unusual for him, of course, but they had been more vivid and destructive than in years. He knows why.

Athos looks away from Milady as she curtseys, making the King goggle and give his toothy grin and the Queen glare in tandem. In neither of those frantic couplings had he been able to peel off her tight bodice and corsets, so the curves she’s so obligingly shoving in their monarchs’ faces have remained untouched by him. Seeing them right now gives him the conflicting desires of yanking up her bodice to hide them from others, and yanking it down so he can refamiliarize his eyes, hands and mouth with every impossibly smooth inch of her skin. If he keeps looking, he’ll keep considering what he wants to do, and the situation will only get worse.

God’s blood, he doesn’t know what they’re thinking.

Well, he knows what _he_ was thinking when he grabbed her in that alley. He’d thought nothing at all. He’d let his body think for him and looking at her now he wishes he could do the same. It’s a betrayal of Thomas, a betrayal of his new brothers, a betrayal of his oaths, and ultimately a betrayal of everything he stands for, but the fire in his blood doesn’t recognise any of that. He still yearns for her with a half-crazed desperation he cannot shake, thought be damned. But what was she thinking when she continued it the other day? Why take him to her rooms, take him into her mouth? What game is she playing?

It’s not much of a game, when he has so much less at stake than she does. If the King finds out, she’ll have nothing. The man might not believe in fidelity for himself, but for his wife and his mistress, he’s certainly a believer – kings are, after all, entitled to be hypocrites. She’d be lucky just to end up on the streets with the clothes she is wearing if Louis finds out. It’s also likely Athos will lose his commission, of course, but he finds it hard to believe that Anne considers that as much of a loss as her home and source of safety and all her possessions.

Her motives confuse him, and he doesn’t like being confused by her. If he questions her intentions, he questions everything, and he can’t afford to do that, not now, not ever.

The thing is. The thing is, he knows it was all a lie. All of it. Every moment since he first saw her – the first smile, first laugh, first kiss. And of course, the first time she opened herself to him, wet and wanting, that was a lie too. 

He tries not to think of it much, which is to say he thinks of the sex itself too much, but tries never to analyse those moments closely. It is, after all, so small considering all her other lies. It shouldn’t matter at all. And it doesn’t matter, not really. It hurts his pride, of course, to think of it, but the lies that her body told don’t break his heart the way the rest of her lies did. It’s a sting, but only a sting. It makes sense. Of course a seductress like her could make a man believe she wanted him above all others, could act out desperate passion, could moan and scream and writhe and do whatever it took to sell herself and the con, could pretend to come again and again until her voice was nothing but a thread, could devour a man as if she had been lost in the desert and he was a spring.

For their entire marriage, he was on fire for her. He thought about nothing but her. He felt like he could drink and eat and breathe love, her touch the only nourishment he needed. He would wake up hard and rouse her from sleep with kisses and licks, or sleep in after a long night and be woken by her lips stretched around him. He would be distracted from his valet dressing him by wanting to interrupt her maid lacing her dress, would lose track of his accounts when she leant against the desk to ask him something, would drag her from the table after watching the movement of her mouth and throat when she ate, would suggest early nights and outings and picnics where he feasted on nothing but the taste of her. Back then, there seemed nothing embarrassing about it. They were so passionately in love, after all, and she assured him she was just as afflicted as he was.

It’s humiliating, now, to think how she must have viewed that. Oh, it was useful, no doubt, just as his love for her was useful, it was something to take advantage of. It was easy to distract or persuade him or to stop him asking awkward questions. All she ever had to do was smirk or make a moue and he was dragged to her lips almost against his will. But it must also have irritated her, that demand upon her time and acting skill. In those long five years, steadily taking apart the past memory by memory, he pictured her rolling her eyes at the wall while he sucked at her neck, staring upwards in boredom and pretending to writhe while he licked into her, thinking about what jewel to ask for as she took him into her body and squeezed around him. How exhausting and mind-numbing it must have been, to put up with his need so constantly, to have to pretend passion multiple times every day. He must have seemed like an animal in heat to her, always acting on pure instinct, so needy for her that all common sense and dignity was disregarded.

But now he must question these memories again, because now she has risked everything she has for the touch and the taste of him. What motivates someone to do that? She had moved exactly as she had back then, just as desperate and shameless, arching and pressing like a woman not in control of herself. Her face had been flushed and her eyes had gleamed with lust, and he’s damned if he can think of a reason for her to lie now, about this. So what if it was true? What if, when he was on fire for her, she had been on fire for him as well?

If he could pick one part of his marriage to be truth, it wouldn’t be the parts that took place in bed (all right, and on desks, and in fields, and a thousand other places, but _primarily_ in bed). Sex was wound around his love for her, but it wasn’t the core of it – he had laughed with her, and played like children with her, and curled around her for comfort, and told her every silly thought that entered his head. There was nothing he did not share with her, no moment he did not want her nearby. He had been split open before her as surely as if he sliced into his own chest and presented her with his heart. Athos had let her into him so completely, every insecurity laid bare, every fear acknowledged, every private shame shared. In hindsight, all of his small sins seem petty and childish, but at the time they were as big as mountains, and sharing them had cost him. He had told her nearly everything, and when he didn’t tell her something, it was only because he was sure she knew it anyway. Right from the start they needed only a glance to know each other’s thoughts. Half their conversations were done in sly smiles and the raising of an eyebrow, so in sync that words would have been almost superfluous if they had not each loved the sound of the other’s voice.

Again, nothing to be embarrassed about, when it went both ways, when he thought she did the same, when he believed he knew every kink in her soul. But in fact he had laid out every part of himself open for her examination, and instead of reciprocating, she had told him nothing. He had never even known her real name. He thought she was angel who could see his every flaw and loved him anyway, but in fact she had seen his every flaw and barely given it a thought because compared to his riches, nothing else had mattered. He could have confessed far greater sins and she would have pretended to forgive them with as much loving understanding. She had not wanted Athos, she had wanted the comte, she had wanted La Fere.

He had given everything he had to someone who had never cared the snap of her fingers for him. He couldn’t imagine a greater heartbreak or a more complete betrayal than that. Only a monster could even envisage doing something so cruel, let alone carry it out. He might have chosen to close his eyes and lived in denial that she could be that soulless, but no denial could last when the corpse of his adored little brother lay cold and bloody on the floor, when her perfect lips shaped terrible, disgusting falsehoods. She thought lies would save her, that they could convince him, and looking at the time he spent with her, he could see why she believed that he would fall for any story she spun. After all, he always had.

And apparently, the temptation to believe her will always be there. He wants to believe her now, after all, even if it is just believing the look in her eyes as he pushed inside of her. The trouble is, if he begins to think she was telling the truth about her passion for him, he has to wonder what else was truth. Athos hadn’t spent years tearing apart the past to sort it into two piles, one of truth and one of lies. It was easier to work out it out backwards, like a logic puzzle – here are all the lies she told, now to work out what each one was for, how each one began. This is what she must have intended, this is what she must have thought. This lie to stop me looking closer, this lie to make me doubt my brother, this lie to persuade me to buy her some trinket, this lie to amuse herself. He mourned a woman he convinced himself never existed, and despised her creator, and that was easier than trying to comprehend the existence of a woman who could be both.

He can’t start wondering if there was honesty twisted within her deceit. That way lies madness. That way lies nights waking in a cold, sickly sweat, _what if what if what if what if_ , could it be true, could Thomas have been a monster, could she have been innocent, _could she have loved him_? Bad enough to think he had her executed, unbearable to think that it may have been a murder instead, that her death was for nothing, that the destruction of his life and love and all his hopes was for nothing. He feels enough guilt about what happened then as it is. He will not let her do that to him.

Perhaps that’s why she slept with him again, he thinks. Purely to play mind games with him. That would be very like her.

“So I assume we should fear no attack, with the gallant and oh-so-attentive Musketeers about,” Anne says from right next to him. “I feel safer already.”

If he hadn’t spent the past six years being regularly shot at, he would jump right out of his skin. Yet again she’s managed to sneak up on him. He turns and looks down into clear green eyes glittering with amusement and just a hint of malice.

She’s beautiful, though, even when she’s cruel. Before he saw her again in the light of a burning house he thought he had polished her image in his mind even as he’d deconstructed the rest of her, turning her from flawed flesh and blood to an idealised version of her, something infinitely more beautiful than any real human being could be. But then he did see her and found that five years of fevered dreams and sunlit memories hadn’t done her justice. Every time he sees her, he thinks the same thing. She’s sharper, realer, funnier, crueller, and somehow both more attractive and more frightening because of it.

“I’m not sure how safe you should feel,” Athos says, aware it’s not much of a comeback. But just as once upon a time she inspired his every thought to pour from his mouth, now she seems to suck them away, leaving him dry and useless. “I’ve heard there are assassins about.”

She widens her eyes at him. “Goodness, how terrifying. But I’m sure you’ll dive in front of the King should any assassin dare to lay hands on him.”

Is it a hint? A taunt? Impossible to tell. What does she _want_? Anne de Breuil wanted money, position, status, respect. Milady de Winter has all those things. And yet he has the odd feeling that if he were to kiss her in front of all these witnesses, she would still kiss back. Five seconds later they would both lose everything they cared about, of course, but it would solve the immediate problem of how desperately he wants to kiss her, so it might still be worth it.

Before seeing her again, he never realised you could loathe someone with every fibre of your being and want them even more desperately at the same time. He hates her even more for the lesson.

“What are you doing over here? I’m on duty.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re standing in front of the wine, Athos. The King would like some. Frankly, so would I.”

“You could have sent a servant,” he points out.

“But attractive women bearing wine are irresistible,” she says. “Of course, most men find the _woman_ the more interesting of the two, but I can understand your confusion.”

She pours the wine into two cups, and he’s not confused at all, at least not about that. He could dash the wine to the ground and kiss her until she opens against him like a flower. He doesn’t, of course. There’s still one shred of sanity she hasn’t managed to tear away from him.

“I believe I’ll see you tomorrow as well? You and the rest of those imbeciles. For the eclipse, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he grits out. One Musketeer will not do, not for a trip like that, so all their small group will be there, however little they want to. He already wonders how long he’ll last around her. These past hours have been torture enough. Thank God his shift is over soon and another man will take over. Take over guarding the King, that is, not staring into the sky and thinking despairing thoughts about Milady de Winter. He hopes.

Anne – Milady – walks away with a sway of her hips that draws every eye in the place.

Christ. Is she trying to drive him mad? Is that her game?

All right. He decides to try coming at this from a different angle. What if her desire for him was one truth she told, was perhaps the only truth she told? Nothing to do with romantic feelings, nothing to do with love, but also nothing to do with her goddamn manipulations and schemes. What if the way she arches against him is nothing but the heat in his blood lighting hers on fire as well? Meaning nothing, signifying nothing, but still honest. Does that one truth matter?

It’s a balm to his ego, of course. It’s gratifying to think that instead of rolling her eyes at his lust, she was an eager participant. If that is true, it can’t have been part of her plan, he thinks with a stab of dry amusement. Consider it a perk of the job?

Of course – and now his amusement vanishes – perhaps that was why she had liked her job of seducing rich men in the first place. Still liked it, presumably, given her pleasure at gaining the King’s attention. Perhaps it has nothing to do with him at all. He has resigned himself to only ever really wanting one woman, no matter how he tries to want others, but he has never met another person who works like that. Look at his brothers – they fall in and out of lust over the course of a day, never pausing, never looking back. Every woman Athos remembers before he met Anne de Breuil is in shades of grey in comparison to her brightness, and every woman he has met afterwards has looked and sounded and felt wrong in a way he can’t explain, but his feelings have nothing to do with hers. Perhaps any man with a working cock is enough for her – _nearly_ any man, he corrects, since if it was any man at all, the King would satisfy her, and if she is willing to fuck Athos in spite of her affair with Louis, clearly he isn’t satisfying her. But then, if there was any man unable to please even the most easily satisfied of women, it would probably be Louis.

Athos wants to push her against a wall again and take her, wants her to sink to her knees again and devour him, wants to taste her the way he used to until she is mindless and sobbing for release. He wants her rocking hot on top of him, spread underneath him writhing, on all fours before him moaning, and in a thousand other ways that both disgust and arouse him simultaneously. He can honestly say that he dreams of it. But it is, always and forever, only _her_ in those dreams, since the moment he met her. The idea that any similar fantasies she has involve a faceless, nameless man, that it could be anybody in her bed and in her body and she would not mind, that the only reason he stands out in her memories is because of her hatred of him… that is insupportable.

_You love me_ , she’d taunted him. He thinks that back when he was very drunk and his family estate was burning, she claimed again that her deeds back then were for love, but he cannot be sure. Even if she did, he knows the mention of love was a manipulation, and past tense besides. And who’s to say this affair isn’t her latest manipulation? She _had_ chosen to cut through an alley instead of staying with the palace servant where he could not have touched her, had conveniently run into him around a corner in the palace, had been the one to invite him slyly to her room after heating his blood to the point he’d follow mindlessly. This could well be some kind of greater plan with an end he doesn’t understand. Him losing his commission? The King demanding his death? His brothers abandoning him in disgust? It could be anything.

She looks his way. He thinks she is smirking, but the sun makes it hard to see. The King raises the glass she brought him in a toast and she follows suit, but they both know her toast is aimed at him, and it’s a mocking one. From this distance she is as hard, cold and perfect as an effigy, and he would like to press his fingers into her skin to remind himself that she is still soft and living.

He hates her. He wants her. At the end of the day, it’s always her.


	4. 2x06: Along for the Ride

Milady doesn’t know why she insists on riding back to Paris from Marmion’s estate. Perhaps it’s pride – no matter which carriage she took, she’s damn sure the Queen would have found a way to smirk at her self-righteously from her own lovely one. Perhaps it’s common sense – the King is a fool, and changes his mind with (hah!) the toss of a coin, but he’s clearly annoyed enough that she’ll get nowhere tonight. Or perhaps she doesn’t want to let this go, just yet, this feeling of finally wearing her own skin. When she’s in these comfortable, practical clothes, her knife worn openly, a scarf wrapped around her disfigured neck, sitting astride a horse properly instead of sidesaddle, she feels like she wears almost no masks at all.

While she’s in a sour mood, disgusted by her own stupidity, she’s trying to not to let herself fall into depression. She’s probably lost the King, but she hasn’t lost everything, despite what she told Athos. She has that necklace, for one. That’s worth quite a few livres. She’ll be fine. She just needs to decide where to go from here. She doesn’t want to leave Paris, but that’s a place, not a plan.

“Milady de Winter,” Treville says, clearing his throat awkwardly. He’s riding beside her. Porthos is in front, holding the reins awkwardly with one arm barely functional, but he glances back when he hears Treville speak. Athos and Aramis have dropped behind. She’s been trying to ignore Athos’s thoughtful gaze burning the back of his neck since they left.

“Yes, ex-Captain?”

“Do you have…” he looks awkward but ploughs on with the bluntness he’s never been good at disguising. “Do you have somewhere to stay? It sounded as if you may not be welcome at the Louvre tonight. Once we get back to the Garrison someone can escort you to an inn, perhaps.”

“I’m perfectly capable of finding one on my own,” she says crisply. “I have no intention of detouring to the Garrison, either.” She’s ignored, of course.

“I’ll go with her,” rumbles Porthos, looking around.

“The both of us, perhaps,” Aramis suggests, and she doesn’t need to look back at him to know that his expression holds just as much suspicion as Porthos’s does. “Or all of us, even.”

Blood of Christ, these Musketeers. Their pig-headed distrust never ceases to annoy her. What do they think she will do, if left to run about unchecked? Murder the King now he is no use to her? Break into the Louvre and take the Queen’s jewellery? She should be flattered they think her so dangerous. Or perhaps they just realised that she is riding a Musketeer horse right now and is unlikely to return it in the morning if she breaks off from the group. From maîtresse-en-titre to horse thief, quite a fall. But then, she has fallen further, and still found her way back up.

“Don’t be fools,” Athos calls out. His tone is pleasant enough – for him, anyway – but she can hear the steel in it. “You’re both injured, and I doubt we could pry D’Artagnan away from Constance if we tried. I’ll escort her and bring back the horse after.” So it is the horse, after all – well, that’s insulting.

Glancing at them, Milady can see that both Aramis and Porthos are uneasy with that suggestion, but neither gainsay it. Treville opens his mouth as if to direct them and then seemingly remembers he has no authority now and falls to brooding instead.

She wonders if Athos is thinking what they could do with a nice private room in an inn. Before this moment, she hadn’t considered spending her evening that way, but it’s tempting. A fight always leaves her jittery and keyed up and he’s probably the same, full of itchy adrenaline begging to be used up. Really, the only reason she dislikes the idea is because she is annoyed with him, him and his endless suspicion and his patronising affirmation of _respect_ , and so she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of falling into bed with him.

Milady urges her horse faster, mind running through other things. Yes, perhaps she’ll have Athos tonight after all, if that’s what he’s after. But she is angry, right now, angry at him, angry at the situation, angry at her own idiocy. She knew the King liked to think himself smarter than her, more capable, stronger, turned on by his own superiority – half the reason he doesn’t want his own wife is because even that soft-faced Spanish doll has a spine of steel compared to him and she demonstrates that daily. Louis liked to feel the man with Milady, bold and masterful, and she ruined that by proving she is easily twenty times as useful as he is when the situation goes to shit. If she’d stammered and sobbed through the ordeal he would probably have fallen on her for solace after, pretending to be comforting her instead. If she’d gotten out of there and then apologised later on her knees for abandoning him, he might have graciously forgiven her. But instead she had played hero and soldier, two things King Louis will never be, and he can’t look at her now without seeing his own failings and despising her for throwing them into such sharp relief.

And why had she done it? Was the Cardinal right when he used to wonder if she experienced pleasure taking lives? Certainly, she’d felt the draw of the fight. She feels the aftereffects of it now, the battle high buzzing in her lungs as she breathes, the taste of victory tart on her tongue, her skin tight and tingling with it all. Her life has been comfortable, of late, but Milady is so used to risk that sometimes comfort seems like dullness.

Once upon a time she lived a life which was all comfort and no real risk at all, and yet she was never bored then. But at the time, she had loved Athos so completely, without restraint, without common sense, that it felt like the most dangerous thing she had ever done. As it turned out, she was right to feel that way.

She splits off from the Musketeers without warning them as they approach the city. Porthos says “Oi!” loudly as she passes him, but she ignores him and urges her horse to greater speed, and in less than a minute they’re all out of sight, all of them except Athos, of course.

He keeps pace with her, gaze still burning her back. She feels it so intensely it’s as if he’s running his fingers down her spine, hitting every bump on the way down, and eventually it annoys her enough that she slows down so he can ride beside her. She doesn’t like the feel of goose bumps down her back just from a stare, she doesn’t like that she reacts to him so easily.

“You’re paying for the room,” she says.

It’s hard to tell in the half-darkness, but she thinks he raises an eyebrow at her. “Why would I pay for your room?”

“Oh, I think you’ll end up using it too, don’t you?” she says in an almost sing-song tone. “But regardless, you’ll have to pay. I don’t exactly carry my coin purse to stargazing parties. I don’t have a sou on me.”

“How were you planning to afford a room if one of us didn’t escort you, then?” he asks, and almost cuts the end of his sentence off with a sigh of realisation. “Ah, of course. Forget I asked.”

She wonders which of her skills he’s thinking of. Perhaps he’s picturing her fucking another man for temporary accommodation. Or perhaps he’s thinking of her lying in a fancy bed, the owner sprawled out and bloody on the floor beside it. Both are incorrect – she was a thief before she was a whore or a murderess, and after a long day it’s the easiest skill to fall back on. He can picture whatever he likes, but she does feel a sting at how fast his purported ‘respect’ has disappeared.

“I saved the bloody day, didn’t I?” she says, more angrily than she’d intended. “For no reward, I might add. I think the least I deserve in return for my selflessness is a room at the inn, Athos.”

“You can’t retroactively claim you were being selfless simply because you didn’t end up getting anything out of it,” Athos says incredulously. “Your motives were entirely selfish. You told me that yourself.”

“And yet, despite that, I got nothing out of it. It’s like a morality play, my lack of scruples coming back to bite me immediately. Aren’t you worried about what fate will slam you with if you leave me sleeping in the streets?”

He snorts, but doesn’t reply. After a long pause filled by the noise of horses’ hooves, he says, “I’m not planning to join you in the room. That’s not why I offered to escort you.”

“Are you that attached to this specific horse?” she asks dryly. “Please, of course that’s why you’re here. Don’t pretend you’re guarding people from me. You know that leaving me at an inn is hardly going to ensure I stay there. It’s not a jail cell. I could be anywhere in the city by morning and you’d be powerless to stop me.”

“Is it too much to believe that I am concerned about your safety?”

“This again?” she sighs, rolling her eyes even though he can’t see her. “I find that unlikely, Athos.”

“I tried to keep you out of the fight before,” he points out.

They’re nearly at the inn by now and the horses have slowed to a trot. “Yes,” she says, only half joking. “I wondered at the time why you were so concerned about Marmion’s guards, but then I realised you were just worried I’d be tempted to waste my shot on you or one of your little friends.”

He lets out a huff of air that could be laughter, frustration, or simply exhaustion. Well, maybe not laughter. This is Athos, after all.

“We’re here,” she says. Normally she’d dismount herself, but purely to annoy him she waits and makes him help her down. She shouldn’t have – at the feel of his hands on her she knows she will absolutely share the room with him tonight, however annoyed she is. She reminds herself to stay in control. Her day has been awful – if she’s doing this with him tonight, it will be on her terms, not his.

He pays while she gives the horses into the care of the inn’s groom, and then they’re walking together to the room.

He starts to shift uneasily as they reach the door. “I shouldn’t do this,” he says softly. She can hear that his breath is coming faster, though, and his words beg her to convince him.

She lets out a snort of laughter, honestly amused. “Because you’ll hate yourself more for fucking me three times than just two? Or five hundred and three times instead of five hundred and two, if we’re counting ancient history.”

“It’s a betrayal…”

“Oh, for God’s sake. You’re a terrible liar, Athos, except to yourself. I know you’re coming in.” She walks into the room without looking back and starts to take off the coat. “The fight got your blood up, didn’t it? Or something up, anyway. Tell me, was it when I leaned in close and took your gun that did it?”

“It was from the moment you turned up with your dress half-missing, ordering us around, and you damn well know it,” he replies, voice thick and low. His eyes are hooded as he surveys her and, as always, she wonders just what he sees.

He closes the door gently and moves towards her, reaching out to pull her into his arms and a kiss, and she evades him and steps back, holding up a hand. “No,” she says clearly, even though her breath is starting to sound a little shaky and she can feel the fire in her belly start to burn.

Athos halts. He doesn’t ask her what she’s playing at, just crosses his arms and regards her thoughtfully. The only sign of confusion he shows is the questioning arch of an eyebrow.

“I already told you that you owe me for all my selfless behaviour tonight,” she tells him. “And as I said, I don’t want your respect. I want something else. If me ordering around you gets you hard, this is your lucky night, Athos. _Strip_.”

He stares at her, on the edge of protest, anger warring with lust in his eyes, and she knows she’s got him when he closes them in defeat. For Athos, anger feeds lust, so in a competition, lust was always going to win out.

“I said strip. _Now_ ,” she says anyway, just to hurry him up, and starts loosening her shirt as he does so. She doesn’t put on a performance as she takes her clothes off, too distracted by the skin appearing in front of her, and of course Athos doesn’t bother either, so it’s only seconds later that they’re unclothed and she says, struggling to keep her voice even, “Get on the bed. On your back.”

She still has her hair pulled back and her throat covered with a scarf, but otherwise she’s completely bare before him, as she hasn’t been since their marriage. His gaze is glued to her, ceaselessly tracing a burning path from her legs to her cunt to her breasts and back again, and she flushes with the feel of it, straightening and bracing a hand on her hip. She stares boldly back at him, aroused and unashamed. He’s distracting in the dying light as well, all scarred muscle and pale skin, and she’s getting wet already just at the thought of what she will do, how he will react, what it will feel like.

Again, he makes her repeat the order, but he still obeys and she’s looking down at him spread out on the bedsheets for her use. “Don’t touch,” she orders him, and then moves to straddle him, the intersect of her thighs against his stomach. He reaches for her automatically, to steady her, to pull her in, and she says, “I told you, _don’t touch_. Will you make me repeat everything twice? Do Musketeers not know how to obey orders?”

He growls but lets his hands drop to fist in the sheets, staring up at her with a tortured expression.

Well, if he’s feeling tortured now, he will definitely not enjoy this, she thinks smugly, and starts to explore. She begins by biting into the thick muscle of his shoulder, then licking and kissing her way down his chest and then across to the other side. She uses her fingers against him and sometimes her nails, soothing the sting with the hot wetness of her mouth, then digging in her nails again just because. By the time she scrapes her teeth against his neck, his head is thrown back, every muscle rigid, his tendons visible for her to lick along and bite. His body jumps at every kiss, every touch. He stops breathing when she sucks at the spot just under the hollow below his ear, only remembering to start up again when she pulls back.

“Enjoying yourself?” she says, and is surprised by how breathless she sounds. She’s more turned on than she realised by having him like this, and she slips her hand down between their bodies to find her clit, closing her eyes and moaning against his chest as she plays with herself. He lets out a desperate groan and a little buck of his lower body at the feel of her writhing against him, at the wetness of her arousal spreading across his stomach, but he manages to stay still otherwise.

She inhales the scent of his sweat and her own need and rubs her fingers harder against herself, desperate little circles, each one making her tenser, a spring winding tight. As she stretches to try and ease the ache of a day spent riding and running about she can feel his cock hard against her leg and can’t prevent a smug little smile, but that’s quickly overtaken by need. She can’t move her hand fast enough and her breath is coming in little pants and she bites down his shoulder again but then changes her mind and just presses her face against it, arching and touching and feeling him against her, the hard little nubs of her nipples scraping against the hair of his chest, her fingers faster and rougher and making obscene little noises as she drags them through her wetness, and oh God, the way he’s panting, his hands claws in the bedsheets as he struggles not to reach for her, every muscle tensed, the hot insistence of his stiff cock brushing against her, and then she’s surging and writhing against her own hand, arching away from him and falling back and coming, coming hard, coming apart all over him, whimpering against his chest and squirming mindlessly so that her skin brushes his cock until he is choking on need.

Milady lets herself slump against him for a good twenty seconds or so after, smug but nowhere near sated. “Well, that was pleasant,” she says lazily. She’s tempted to tell him she has no more need of him, just to see his face, but it would be too obviously a lie. She wants to start again immediately, but first she raises her wet hand to his face and says, “Lick it clean.”

To her astonishment, he does, slowly and thoroughly. She must have really impressed him today for him to be in such an obedient mood. Either that or the guilt is somehow less when he can pretend he’s not an active participant, just an innocent man seduced by her lust. Certainly the priests would view it that way.

He moans at the taste of her just as she moans at the feel of his eager tongue licking against her fingers, the rasp of his facial hair against her hand as he does so reminding her of long-ago days when she felt that rasp on her inner thighs regularly. He always craved the taste of her, and she was embarrassingly eager to give it to him, so there were days he’d spend what seemed like hours on his knees before her, heedless of what the church said about sinful pleasure or the dominance of men, licking into her until she sobbed with overstimulation and want.

“It’s so long since I’ve seen you,” he says around her fingers, and she’s confused by what he means for a moment – he sees her all the time, of course he does – but then she notices his eyes are fixed on her breasts. It’s been years, she remembers, since he’s seen her fully naked, or even mostly naked – the dresses she wears aren’t the easiest to get out of for quick clinches. That’s yet another plus for the men’s clothes she’d worn earlier, one that the King could be discovering now if he were not such a weakling, but she finds that the last thing she wants to think of is the King when she has Athos like this. She pulls her fingers from his mouth, braces both hands on his chest and wriggles against him deliberately. His abdomen is still wet from her orgasm and her wriggling about just makes it worse, but it also makes her breasts jiggle a little, and his hands start to reach for them before she snaps;

“Control yourself,” she grabs his wrists and pushes him so his arms are above his head and she’s leaning over him, bare breasts only inches from his face, unavoidable. His eyes are black with lust. “Or do I have to tie you down?”

He groans just at the idea, hips pushing uselessly upwards against the air, but he keeps his arms where they are and lets her get on with it.

Milady has ridden quite far today and her thighs are sore from it, but she thinks she can take a little more. It’s worth it to have him stretched out below her, helpless and wanting. Now that he’s being properly obedient again she decides it’s time to reward him. She squeezes his balls lightly, earning another noise of agony and needy thrust upwards, and then impales herself very slowly on his cock. It’s the first direct, deliberate touch she’s given it, sinking all her wet warmth down inch by slow inch until he is fully sheathed within her, and she’s not surprised when he cries out, hands fisting white-knuckled in the sheets to avoid reaching for her.

“I asked before if you were enjoying this,” she says breathlessly, fingers curling against his chest as she tries to adjust to the feeling of him hard inside her. “It’s rude – ah -” her breath stutters and she loses her train of thought as she rocks against him a little, the heat racing through her. “Rude to ignore a question, Musketeer.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says, choking out the word like it’s a prayer to God, and she decides to take it as enough of an answer. It’s succinct, at least, and if what he’s feeling is anything like what she’s feeling, it’s accurate as well. Or perhaps it’s simply a request, and if so, this one she feels inclined to grant.

She rides him hard, rides him like a horse she is trying to break, giving no quarter, allowing him no time to catch his breath, allowing herself even less. He is hard between her thighs and the feel of it drives her as wild as it ever has, she finds she cannot stop moving, she cannot pause. Her body is barely under her control. She moves ceaselessly, rocking against him, riding him to the rhythm of her hot blood, her pounding heartbeat, her racing pulse; she impales herself on him again and again and again, unwilling to push up more than halfway and lose the feeling of fulness but unable to stop pushing away and towards if it would make her lose the hot hard thrust of him inside her; she tries to press her chest against his to ease the ache in her breasts but sobs in unsatisfied need when that makes the angle of her movement wrong and leans back again instead, nipples hard and longing for the touch she won’t let him give. Her fingers are claws against his chest now, not just bracing but contracting, her nails leaving bloody little crescents as her body arches against her will.

“Please,” he chokes out, body hard with tension, shaking, every muscle rigid and controlled so as not to thrust up against her, not to reach out and touch her. He is trying to turn every part of himself into marble in his unwilling obedience, face carved in ridges, chest as solid in its tension as a Grecian statue’s, legs and arms like stone pillars digging into a foundation of sheets, but one part of him is not stone even if it’s just as hard. He is hot and insistent within her, and his face is twisted with desperate desire, and his plea is frantic. His eyes dart between her naked breasts, watching them move, and the place where they are joined, watching his cock disappear inside her wet heat again and again. He sounds like he will die if he cannot touch her.

She doesn’t speak, can’t speak, can’t nod, but she manages to detach one of her hands from his chest and move it to his arm instead, pulling at it blindly, and he understands that she is giving him permission. In a second he is moving against her, guiding her hips, arching up against her to lick at her nipples hungrily, and then one of his hands finds the place where her body meets his, pressing and rubbing against her urgently, and she is lost.

Milady moves against him unthinkingly, voice a ragged scream she cannot hope to stem, coming and coming again against the kneading pressure of his thumb against her clit, the unrelenting thrusting of his cock within her cunt, the wet suction of his mouth around her nipple, the whole world alternating between hard little slashes of incomprehensible colour and noise and the overwhelming insanity of pleasure, so strong she cannot process sound or sight but only the feel of him within her. She’s coming all over his cock and there’s nothing but him in the world, nothing but the push of him, and she wants more and more and more, spasming again and crying out with it all, and then he’s slamming up into her as she grinds down on him, crying out as he spends inside her, hammering up into her helplessly, harder, harder, more, until he falls back with a groan, utterly spent.

She collapses forward onto him, inhaling and exhaling in harsh, wet gasps against his chest, eyes wet, her breath lost for the moment, her self-control seemingly lost forever. Her body is so sated and sensitive that the feel of his softening cock inside her should be uncomfortable, but instead she feels unreasoningly that if she pulls herself away from him this time she will only feel empty and unfulfilled despite her satiation. So she just leans against him and breathes and breathes and breathes herself back into something approaching normality.

It is some time before he speaks, and when he does, his voice sounds like it’s wrenched from his soul. “The other times… weren’t like that.”

“No,” she agrees tiredly, but she can’t let him turn this into something meaningful. She’s not even sure why she thinks it could turn in to that, but it’s something to do with the way he lay there, the agonising amount of self-control it took for him to wait for permission, the tension she felt in him as he obeyed. But he had obeyed anyway, with hardly a murmur of protest, without the curses and near-violence that had characterised their other encounters. He hadn’t seemed angry at her, hadn’t glared the whole time like he hated her or hated what they were doing, hadn’t seemed filled with disgusted rage. He’d been content to let her lead, to lay back and allow her to wring out gasp after desperate gasp from him. It wasn’t like when they were married and the times he had happily allowed her to do whatever she wished, or even exactly like their occasional, playful battles for dominance in their bedroom at La Fere, but it was closer to their past games than she’s comfortable with.

She feels like they just fucked away all her layers of pretence, like all her layers of strength and bitterness and sarcasm and irreverence and cruelty have been stripped from her. It leaves her raw and stinging, nothing but bare skin for the whip of whatever comment he could make, and there is nothing she can do but try and build them up again as quickly as possible. “Who knew you required such a strong hand on your reins?” she says, striving for a light tone and instead achieving an uninterested one. She doesn’t stop, though, too intent on patching the holes in her mask. After all, there is no one like Athos for aiming for the weakest, most human parts of her. “I suppose now at least we have proof that Musketeers _can_ obey orders, and that they enjoy it immensely when they do. If I were still on speaking terms with the King I’d commend your obedience to him.”

This pause is shorter, but she can feel him stewing during it, feel his rising anger at her scathing indifference, and that makes it longer. It’s been six years since they were impossibly, openly, desperately in love, and yet she still hurts when he hurts, like a finger pressing against an invisible bruise. “Does it all mean so little to you? Are you like this with every man?”

Perhaps she’d slap him, if she were not so tired, so sated, so much a stranger to herself in this moment. Instead she lies there, unmoving, unthinking, eyes closed.

Her face is still resting on his chest, but he uses one hand on her chin to try and tilt her head to see it, and she ducks her head to avoid him, huffing out a frustrated breath. “Would you believe me?” she says, and now her voice is perfectly flat, albeit slightly muffled against his skin. “Would you believe me if I said, no, Athos, I am not like this with every man. If I said, no, it’s always been you, you are the only one who can do this to me, you are the only one I want like this. If I said that, would you believe me?”

“No.”

“Well, then,” she says, tilting her head to meet his eyes. For just one moment, she lets herself be foolishly, brazenly sincere, unearths the secrets of her heart and lets them leak out through her gaze, because he won’t believe it. “No, Athos, it’s not every man. You are the only one who can do this to me, you are the only one I want -” she stretches, presses a trembling kiss to the corner of his mouth, “- you are the only person I’ve ever loved. It’s only ever been you.”

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, they are glassy. “Please don’t,” he says, voice rough and broken, the second time he’s begged her tonight. “Just don’t.”

It feels like peeling off her own skin to move away from him, but she does it, rolling off him to lay beside him on the bed. Her skin immediately cools now that his warmth isn’t touching her. “Well, then,” she says, back in her flat tone. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want me to answer.”

She closes her eyes and pretends to sleep as he gets up and dresses himself in the near-darkness, and doesn’t let the tears beneath her eyelids leak out, not even when he touches his lips to her cheek before he leaves.


	5. 2x07: An Offer You Can Refuse

It has been a very long week. Rochefort is First Minister, Treville is badly injured, the archbishop is dead, and the one person who could possibly explain what happened has died in mysterious circumstances. Athos should be fully focused on the many ongoing disasters, but instead he is here, a few bottles of wine in and contemplating his own stupidity.

The innkeeper had let him in for a coin, and he’d nearly lost his temper, asking what kind of security that was for the guests who stayed here? No, the innkeeper assured him at first, it was only because monsieur was the one who paid for the room that first night, he would never let him in otherwise. Then after some more questions, actually, he admitted, madame had said to allow anyone who asked entry into the room but only to warn her when she arrived. So now he waits, pistol held ready, fairly sure he is about to die in some inventive way. Even sitting down on the bed had taken considerable courage. Milady’s mind games never cease to amaze him. He is half-afraid poison darts will come flying out of the walls, and he’s angered by his own paranoia. He was already on edge when he got here, half-drunk and belligerent because of it, but the wait and the worrying and the anticipation have keyed him up further.

“What a surprise.” The whisper comes from close enough that he feels the heat of her breath on his ear, and he is about to turn around, but then he feels the cold press of steel on the back of his neck and tenses. After a long, frozen moment, it retracts, and she gives a sigh. “Why are you here, Athos?”

He doesn’t turn. Instead, he picks up the last bottle from its spot on the bed beside him and takes a swig. “I came to see you.”

“I do appreciate the way your tone can make even stating the obvious seem like witty sarcasm, husband, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time or energy to deal with you right now.” She moves around the bed to stand in front of him and he drinks in the sight of her, heavy skirts, tight corset, exhausted expression and all. Her eyes drop to his gun. “Are you about to shoot me?”

He considers it, decides. “Not today.”

“Not today. Well, I’m busy tomorrow, but if you let me know when your schedule opens up, I’m sure we can work something out,” Milady says, lips curving in that smirk that always gets him. “I hate to repeat myself, but if you are not here to shoot me, _why are you here_?”

For a brief second he wonders why she would think he plans to shoot her, scans her quickly for blood on her hands, stolen jewels in her skirts, forged papers in her bodice, or any other signs she’s done something worth killing her over. He can’t see anything, but that means little: if Anne has a hiding place, it will be a good one, and he has no doubt she’s an expert at cleaning off blood and viscera. Then he returns to his real reason for being here, deciding to assume her question is just the result of paranoia. He has, after all, threatened to kill her quite a few times. Right now he’s considering doing it again, just because of that fucking smirk.

“I want you to reconsider my offer,” he tells her, voice firm. He doesn’t want to admit how much it hurt and angered him that she rejected the help he offered, the gesture that was as close to forgiveness as he could come, but thinking about it again makes him tenser than it should. “This is no time to be proud. The money I have will get you out of Paris -”

“And out of your reach, as well,” she observes. “You’ll never have to worry about falling victim to my many temptations again.”

He closes his eyes, reins in his temper. “That’s not why I want you gone.” It’s partially a lie, and worse, she knows it.

It’s paradoxical – he needs her to leave because he doesn’t want her to leave. He can’t take all these little conversations, the banter, the joking, the way sometimes they seem on the edge of talking about something real, of admitting how they feel. He hates the urge he feels to reach out and touch her softly, kiss her gently, hold her closely, fall into her arms and forget his terrible week. He thinks sometimes he’s rougher and crueller with her to try and overcompensate for the feelings he still has for her, the feelings he can’t get rid of no matter how hard he tries.

He can’t help thinking of the waver in her voice when she told him he was the only one, of how he’d felt it like a blow to his gut when she asked if he was happy to see her with no prospects and no hope, of how difficult it has been to force himself not to come up with some feeble excuse to turn up here and see her before now. It infuriates him to realise how very weak and irrational he is when it comes to her, how easily she leaves him off balance and floundering. He despises himself for it, and he despises her for causing it in him.

“Oh, do tell. Are you protecting me again?” she rolls her eyes and takes the wine bottle off him, downing an impressive amount of it. He watches her throat as she swallows, hypnotised by the movement of it, by the graceful line of her profile in the light of the candles, interrupted only by the high collar she wears.

It makes him even angrier, how effortlessly she stokes the lust in him. He prefers to think it is purposeful, yet another manipulation, because the alternative is to admit that his self possession simply evaporates whenever he sees her and it’s another way in which he is so very weak. A year ago she wound her hand around the locket she gave him and reminded him why he wore it, and he’d nearly given in then. He was so close to pushing her against that wall and forgetting everything she’d done and everything she was that he could taste destruction in the back of his throat, and pulling back felt like an amputation, but he’d been proud of himself for doing it anyway. Now that he’s refreshed his memory of what it’s like to have her, against walls, in beds, on her knees, every time he’s near her sensation overpowers sense, and he is ashamed of himself, utterly disgusted with his own weakness, and it’s easy for that self-disgust to transform to rage in his half-drunk mind.

“As well protect a snake,” he says, too harshly. “I want you gone because you’re a complication and a threat.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Athos,” she says, eyes meeting his squarely. She starts to nonchalantly undo the little overjacket she wears, tiny catch by tiny catch, eyes never leaving his, and then the overjacket drops to the floor and the milky skin of her shoulders and neck are on full display, the pale, full swells of her breasts visible above her bodice now. It could simply be her getting comfortable in her own room at the end of a long day, but he is here and so nothing she does is casual. Everything has a reason. He suspects this is to make him lose his mind.

He stands, paces, curses, sits again, snatches back his wine bottle, drinks, stands again. “Why not? What is here for you? What are you planning?”

She gives a half-shrug. “I haven’t finished planning it yet. I assure you, when I do, you won’t need to come to me. I’ll find you.”

Well, that’s more unnerving than anything else she’s said.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says with feeling, downing a considerable amount of the wine. He’s well on his way to drunk, now, and he can feel the rage in him growing, overtaking him. Can’t she ever just listen to him? Can’t she ever just leave?

She gives her most enigmatic smile and reaches out to free the wine bottle from his hand again. “At least you brought wine this time to sweeten the pot. I’m afraid I must still decline your generous offer, however, since as I said, I won’t accept bribery or charity from you, and I am _nowhere_ near done.”

“God dammit, _Milady_ ,” he swears. “If you don’t want to think of it as a gift, think of it as a payment, then. For fuck’s sake, I’m sure you’ve been paid less to do worse and accepted it eagerly enough.”

“As always, your chivalry is an example to all men,” She upends the wine bottle, emptying the rest of it into her mouth, and lets it drop to the floor, wiping her mouth on her arm in a very unfeminine way. “Why not just call me a whore outright, Athos? Or is the word too vulgar for my lord to foul his tongue with? Given some of the places that tongue has been -”

The wine is gone, and with it the last of his patience. “I was referring to your murders, Madame, but I’ve no doubt you’ve done some things in the bedroom that make even your killings look tame,” he spits the words as if he’s talking of the most obscene, repulsive acts imaginable, because he doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to think of the things she’s done or the men she’s done them with. The murders horrify him, but her other activities disgust him on an entirely personal level, and he hates that he feels that way and hates her for forcing him to feel that way.

“And _I’ve_ no doubt those ‘things’ cross your mind whenever you’re alone with only your hand for company. Is calling me a prostitute supposed to be an insult, or is it just a repeated fantasy of yours? I can see the appeal. You could visit my brothel every day, take your pleasure, and put me out of your mind entirely the rest of the time,” she taunts. “I warn you, though, I’m expensive. Especially my mouth.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. Of course he doesn’t want her in a brothel, the thought makes him nauseous. Love or hate Milady de Winter (and he’s done plenty of both), she is brightly coloured in a world full of pastel, vibrant with intelligence and weaponised charisma, as sharp and purposeful as a blade and twice as dangerous. She’s a hundred foolish metaphors that spring into his head, but most of all, she is unforgettable. He can’t imagine a world where a man could pay for an hour with her and discard her easily. Surely any man who spends as much as a minute with her must still be picturing those sharp green eyes on his deathbed. He knows he’ll be picturing them on his.

“I don’t want your mouth, I want your absence,” he growls.

She gives him a sceptical glance. “Oh, yes?” She looks him up and down and then licks her lips with deliberate, lewd slowness, her pink tongue wetting them so they shine, and he thinks of how her lips shone with spit the last time she wrapped them around his cock, thinks of how her smug eyes were intent on his face and how her slender wrists were trapped in his hands, and he thinks of the way it felt to have all that molten wetness surrounding him and sucking him deep. He feels himself harden.

Fuck, of course he wants her mouth. He wants everything.

“I hate you,” he throws the words like a gauntlet, taking a step forward, which is a mistake. This close her scent and her stare make him dizzy. He hadn’t come here to fight or to fuck, but somehow this argument just keeps escalating and he can’t make himself walk away.

Her smirk widens, and she says, “Oh, yes?” again, unconcerned. She leans into him, ever so slightly, so that he’s looking down at her eyes and her mouth and her curves and he can’t see anything but her.

He swears and yanks her to him, taking her mouth ruthlessly. She struggles against him, trying to bite him, but he somehow avoids her teeth and holds her head in place as he pillages her mouth and in moments she’s kissing him back just as fiercely, just as desperately, repelling hands instead fisting in his shirt to force him closer.

His other hand is hard on her back, pressing her body to his, and he’s kissing her so roughly that it seems like the strength of it forces them both to the ground, him on top. They’re one foot from the bed he’d been sitting on before but he doesn’t care, he wants her here, now, hard against the wooden floor. She’s pinned by his body, already trying to rub herself against his hardness through both of their layers of clothing, and he pulls up her skirts and down the stockings she wears under them to get to the bare creamy skin of her legs and ass. There’s a knife there but he doesn’t really register it, yanking the sheathe off her with a careless tug and throwing it into the corner, far more intent on the treasure he’s uncovered.

Milady’s upper half gets tangled in her pushed-up skirts and she tries to wrestle her way out of them while he undoes his trousers, and then she’s trying to push him back, and for a moment he thinks she’s really pushing him away, refusing him, her hands unexpectedly forceful. He pulls back from her a little, and it feels physically painful to do it, the cold separation of it, and he can still see her smirk, her flushed face, and for just a second he wants to push her down again, hard, and just take her. The thought arouses him even as it horrifies him, reminding him what a monster he is, what a monster this overwhelming lust for her makes of him.

“Get on your back,” she gasps instead, and now the reason for her pushing becomes clear, she’s trying to roll them over so she can straddle him like before and ride him to completion. She starts to move up to do so, lips quirking back into that smile, eyes narrowing in consideration of her next move as she looks down at him.

“No,” he snarls, because he’s through with obedience right now, and most of all he’s through with looking at that smug smirk and those green eyes that cut right through him, so instead he grabs at her hips and jerks his hands to twist her around, forcing her onto her front with him behind her. She gives a surprised shriek at his sudden roughness but lets him position her, and then he’s against her, her fallen forward on her hands and knees and him on just his knees behind her, shoving himself against her wetness, not quite inside her yet but close to.

With one hand he yanks her dress so it’s rucked up high over her head again, giving him access to as much skin as possible, his tight grip branding her bare hips and ass, his trousers down just enough to push his cock against her with no barriers. To an outsider they might look exactly like the whore and client she named them as, clothes pulled apart in the quickest and easiest way for a careless fuck, not looking at each other, him touching her only to hold her in place. But she is soaked with need and the way he grinds against her is a promise as much as a threat and there is nothing business-like in the way he pulls her against him. He rubs against her, not pushing inside, just savouring the knowledge of how badly she wants him, just enjoying the way his cock slides against the slickness between her legs.

He lets go of her hips to slide his hands down the curves of her body, just barely able to feel the fevered heat of her skin beneath the corsetry, then moving to the silky flesh of her thighs, touching, caressing, squeezing, stroking. For a second he pauses, caught by the incredible softness of her inner thigh, part of him remembering when he would have licked at it softly, kissed it, scraped his beard against it, not just brushed his hand against it on the way to his real goal. She uses the moment of reprieve from the onslaught of sensation to crawl forward a few inches, just enough to push her skirts down a little so she can see, just enough to turn her head to look at him and catch his gaze. The light of lust makes her green eyes burn, the same fire painting her cheeks pink and reddening those wet lips she claims are so expensive. He would like to take them, as well, but right now he’s too focused on how badly he wants to take her cunt.

She is round and full under his burning gaze, tipped forward onto her hands and knees, legs still spread wide, and the look she gives him over her shoulder is all entreaty, but the choked words spilling from her throat are orders, “Just take me, Athos, _do it_ …” All it takes is that one look and his last remaining ounce of control disappears completely, tossed to the four winds. He grabs her hips again, tightens his hands roughly as a reminder not to try and move away again, and pulls her back so that even that inch of space is gone. The perfect curves of her ass are against him once more and he groans with the feel of all that smoothness and lushness against him.

This could be the last time he has her, if she leaves, he thinks, and when he thinks that, and when he sees her crouching like that, lust flushing her face and darkening her eyes, all he wants is to savagely take and take and _take_ , and she’d said take her, and so he lines himself up and surges forward and slams into her from behind. She whimpers and clenches around him and he is lost.

He fucks her like a beast taking its mate, and she responds in kind. There’s an utter senselessness to it, the way he pushes in hard, harder, made delirious with want, single-mindedly seeking his own pleasure within her body. The floor is hard against his knees but he doesn’t notice it, not when there’s the heat of her cunt all around his cock. She tries to press back against him, tries to reach around to touch him, to clutch at him, but he growls at her like an animal, and she whimpers, and she submits, and he thrusts harder and deeper and rougher, pushing into her over and over, and she comes with a needy whine.

He’s barely aware of it as it happens, too busy slamming himself into her willing body again and again, too busy biting into the curve of her shoulder, too busy leaving fingerprint bruises against the jutting curve of her hips. He’s thrusting into her so hard it would push her forward if he weren’t holding her in place with that unforgiving grip, and she lets her head drop to the floor, another sign of capitulation, and he shoves into her from behind with all the visceral need he tries to pretend he doesn’t have. It’s worse than cruelty because cruelty, at least, is intelligent – this is like the wall in the alley all over again, the bone deep desire crushing every ounce of humanity out of him until he’s only aware that he needs more, harder, _now_.

“ _Bitch_ ,” he growls, close to her ear, the word spilling out of him even though he’s not sure he meant to say it, but she clenches around him and gasps as if the insult turns on her on. He’s grunting with the exertion of all these hard, brutal thrusts, and then she is trying to move against him uselessly again, swept up in a second orgasm, trying to angle herself, trying to get even more of him, and he squeezes her hips a little harder for a moment to remind her that she belongs to him and she does what he says. 

His orgasm is animalistic as well – as he comes he pushes her forward to the floor completely so that she is trapped between it and him, slamming into her as deeply as possible, claiming her utterly, blanketing and surrounding her body with his own, his weight pressing her down, his teeth buried in her shoulder. She lets out a series of uncontrolled, desperate noises, loud enough that the whole inn probably hears her wailing her surrender, desperate cries erupting out of her with every thrust as her breath is forced from her, her body spasming as he takes her from behind, and there is nothing left of him except the need to keep pounding into the warmth of her. She is his and he is taking her, she is open and on offer and crying out with desire, he has her and she is his and she’ll _always_ be his, and he spends deep within her with a bone-deep feeling of savage possessiveness, an animal grunt of satisfaction escaping his lips even as his eyes screw shut and every last bit of his energy spurts out of his cock and into her and she gives in completely once more and her wails rise to a helpless scream of pleasure.

He’s left weak, shaking, and strangely triumphant, and he lays there on her and keeps her trapped, his teeth still lodged in her shoulder. After a minute he loosens his jaw, licking at the indents he made there to sooth the sting, but he doesn’t let go completely and he doesn’t pull himself out of her. He finds he has the word _mine_ echoing in his head, and as sanity returns he wishes they really were just animals, and then all of this could be simple – he could just lay here on her and inside her, and then later when he’s recovered, they could do this again. They could eat, sleep, fuck, hold each other, and never again need to talk or think about the complicated and destructive history that’s so impossible to let go of.

“Don’t take this as agreement to anything,” she says, voice rough from screaming, cheek still pressed against the cold floor. He can feel her body vibrate as she speaks, the hum of it against his chest. “I won’t leave Paris just because you order it.” 

He rolls off her, onto his back, staring blankly at the ceiling, pulling his clothes into order again. The rage is still in him, but it’s banked now, cooling to something that almost seems nastier. “No, you never do anything for other people, do you? You only ever do what you want, damn the consequences, damn the casualties. You’d wreck the world for spite.”

“Or for payment,” she says maliciously, smoothing down her skirts again, all that flushed skin disappearing. “It’s just a shame you can’t afford my price.”

“Apparently I can afford _some_ things,” he says, because he’s not going to let her win this one. “Perhaps the word ‘whore’ isn’t too vulgar to throw around in the presence of a woman like you.”

“If I’m a whore, I suppose at this point you do count as a regular,” she says, voice poisonously sweet.

“I’ll make sure to leave a coin or two on my way out,” he hisses.

She struggles to her feet, and for a second she looks dazed and angry and sore and confused and wrecked and even a little heartbroken, all of the things he feels, and then her mask slams down again and all he can see is the cool malice she uses against him like a knife. “Don’t visit me here again. Like I said, if I want to see you, I’ll find you.”

“I hope to God you won’t want to, then,” he says savagely, and even that is a lie, damn it. His knees hurt but he manages to stand as well, and he pushes past her to get to the door without letting himself register the way her touch feels like a brand. Even through clothing, it feels like that, it always feels like that, and he hates it, just like he hates her, just like he hates this whole situation with her. She could leave, but she won’t, and he can’t leave, so he’ll stay, and he’ll circle around her like he’s caught in her orbit until she pulls him in just to watch him crash against her and break from it. That’s what they are.

It’s a small, petty cruelty, tossing a handful of small change into the room behind him as he exits. He hears her intake of breath, hears the coins bouncing, hears his own heart beating too hard with hurt and anger, and then the door slams shut and he doesn’t have to face her again.


	6. 2x08: The Ties That Bind Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was surprisingly easy to write but I spent a lot of time debating whether to actually post it, mostly because, well, kink. But then I thought 'I'm writing erotic fanfiction, I may as well lean into it.' Let me know your thoughts!
> 
> Also, I have no idea where other people's sympathy was in that scene in the show, but personally I ended up extremely annoyed with Athos. That last comment was not okay.

He rests his hand on top of hers and she thinks she would like to tear out his throat. It’s a very visceral feeling, the sudden fury that overtakes her. She’s so sick of this, this damn game he plays, one moment cold ( _I think our small talk days are done_ ) and the next almost warm ( _My undying gratitude_ ). She hasn’t forgiven the other night, either, and she sees by his eyes she’s not alone in that. She is exhausted, and Rochefort will probably never follow through with giving her the necklace, whatever he says, and she has almost no money left, and she doesn’t want to be here, and she won’t give away her trump card just for love of him. And damn him for thinking she would, for throwing his respect and gratitude about like they’re treats to train a hound, for thinking so little of her.

“I was thinking of something more tangible,” she says coolly, sliding her hand out from under hers and missing the touch of him immediately.

“I have no money for bribes.” Any pretence of friendliness is gone the moment he thinks she’s not going to give him the only leverage she has for free. Of course it is.

“Then speak to Treville,” she says. God knows why she didn’t go straight to him.

Well, God and her know that, really. How could she go straight to Treville when she has an excuse to see Athos? She supposes she could say she feels too much guilt for not saving him from an assassin to see Treville, but unlike Athos, she doesn’t make a habit of lying to herself. She told Athos she would find him if she wants him, and dammit, she always wants him, so going to Treville was never really an option.

“Believe me, my information is worth paying for,” she adds.

“If you know something, speak out for the sake of France.”

What France? The people of France that watched her lose everything and left her in the gutter with no help offered? The country of France that used her for her skills, all the worst of them, again and again and again, only to leave her out to dry whenever she asked for the smallest thing in return? The laws of France that condemned her to death – continue to condemn her – for actions she took to survive? Or does he mean the King of France, that childish, grinning imbecile who left her penniless for the crime of saving him?

“I want a hundred livres,” she says baldly, and watches his response.

He turns his head to the side, as if even looking at her is beneath him, and his expression is incredulous, almost offended. “Whatever your latest scheme is, save it for a more gullible victim,” he says, voice even colder now. “I’ve seen your entire repertoire and I have no desire for an encore.”

She looks down at the table, frustrated with herself and with him, then looks at him, trying to radiate sincerity without warmth. “Give me what I want and you won’t regret it.”

Now he looks back at her and his eyes are wild and his voice is raw as he says, “I gave you _everything_.”

But is it giving when he could take it all back so easily? The only thing he ever really gave her was a scar. She looks at him, heart sinking, and doesn’t know how to verbalise that, doesn’t know how to explain what it is to fear the gutters to a man who grew up in a paradise, doesn’t know how to make him understand what it is to never have the luxury of mistakes to someone who can make as many as they like, doesn’t know how to bridge the gap between them. It looks like the only thing between them is a table, but they may as well be worlds apart, from the look in his eyes.

He stands, he grabs his sword, he goes to leave, and then – he stops. Leans over her. “If you can’t do it for France, do it for your own salvation.”

And how convenient it is, that her salvation should be dependent on his benefit, should be tied to his own gain.

“My God…” he half breathes the words. “There really is nothing in there left to save.”

She is left staring at the wall, eyes burning, hating him and herself equally. She swallows hard, pushing the tears back down her throat. Every time, he does this to her. Every time, she lets him.

He walks away, self-righteous, but she’s not that weak. She swivels in her chair, lets her voice carry across the inn, slicing through the dank air after him like a thrown knife. “If there is nothing inside me, I suppose that explains why you spend so much of your time trying to fill the hole.”

He stiffens. Of course, he can never let her have the last word, anymore than she can let him, so in half a second he’s across the inn again and leaning down, infuriated and surprisingly sober as he glares. “Why must you always be like this? What is _wrong_ with you?”

“For God’s sake, Athos, all I asked you to do was talk to Treville. Let him decide.”

“It seems only days ago you were telling me you didn’t take bribery. Now you beg for it?”

“I don’t beg for _anything_ ,” she snarls, although they both know otherwise. “And it was money to get rid of me, to try and wipe me away like the blood on your sword. I won’t disappear for you, Athos.”

“It was money for a fresh start,” he snaps.

A fresh start as what? She’s excellent at stealing, killing and fucking. Those can lead to many interesting careers, but few legitimate ones. Does he imagine… oh, what was d’Artagnan’s charming description… that she’ll end up miserably plying her trade in some low-life brothel? She’d taunted him about that the other day, but it seems too petty a wish for him after all that has gone between them. Does he really believe she’ll be able to find something respectable, that she’ll move onto a new, dull husband, or to new, dull work like that of a seamstress? Or is her future a matter of indifference to him, provided he doesn’t have to see it himself?

“Really, your money is mine anyway,” she says, deliberately provoking him, lips pressed into a thin smile. “I think the church said something about that when we were married, didn’t they? What’s yours is mine?”

To anyone overhearing them, it might seem a minor taunt, barely even an insult – but to Athos, Athos who believes he gave her ‘everything’, Athos who seems to think that all he ever was to her was money and a title, it must cut like a knife. She can see him go white as she says it, sees the pain slice through him, leaving him breathless. It takes him a moment to recover, to let anger overtake hurt again.

“They also said something about _submitting_ to your husband,” he snarls eventually, as if she hasn’t submitted to him a few times recently, to both their great enjoyment. 

She’s tempted to remind him of those times as cuttingly as possible, but judging by the flash in his eyes as he sees her thoughts on her face, there’s no need to say it out loud. She can hear his breath catch sharply.

“Well, I never have been very religious,” she says innocently instead. “The Bible seems far too sure that men have earned my obedience simply by existing.”

“And just how would you _prefer_ me to earn your obedience?” he asks, and now his voice is colder again, some of his self-possession back. She can see that repressed fury and pain in his gaze, though, no less dangerous for lacking heat. No less exciting, either. He’s towering over her, leaning on the table, muscles tense, and he reminds her of nothing so much as a cornered wolf in the wild – all barely restrained aggression, eyes intent, waiting for its chance, half savage in its desperation. She doubts he’d be flattered by the comparison.

She can’t resist. That seems to be a common problem with them. She moves her head to the side so her lips are inches from his, lets her eyes drop to them, and smiles slowly. It’s not a nice smile. “Guess.”

The next moment his hand is gripping her arm painfully hard, yanking her up out of her seat. He pulls her after him, ignoring her bitten-off curse, and half-drags her to the man at the nearby bar. “One of the rooms across the corridor,” he spits, using his other hand to fumble at his coin purse and produce a few coins.

The man takes them, but hesitates, looking at the way they’re leaning apart from each other, looking at his hand white-knuckled on her upper arm. “Are you… alright, madame?”

“Fine,” she says distractedly, about to mention snidely that he’s her husband, but before she’s even finished the first word Athos is marching them both across the way.

The first door is locked, but the second opens when he tries it, and he shoves her inside and lets go of her upper arm immediately. She twists and stretches her upper body as if he has pulled too hard and wrenched something, rubs her other hand against where he held her, trying to look reproachful. He doesn’t seem to care. She may have angered him more than is safe.

A part of her almost expects him to pull his sword, but instead he says curtly, “Undress. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“And if I don’t?”

“ _Guess_ ,” he says in a mocking echo of her, and then the door slams behind him, leaving her alone in this shabby room with this tiny bed and the smell of cheap ale and wine hanging like a miasma in the air. She wonders if he will throw coins at her again, if she will feel that sudden hit of humiliation and cheapness once more if he does. She thinks she will stab him if he treats her like that again, even if she provoked it deliberately, even if she all but asked for it. They’re both far too good at finding the other’s weak points.

She undresses, hands shaking a little with heightened anticipation. She has to – she owns only three gowns at present, she can’t afford to have him tear this one apart, as fun as that would be. He looks in the mood to tear things apart. Her fingers are clumsy on the catches of the overcoat, and she wonders wildly why they are so small, why she wore this at all. She manages to get everything off, standing shivering and naked in the cool air, and then she doesn’t know what to do. She takes down her hair, arranges it to try and disguise her scars as best she can. She sits uncertainly on the bed. She fidgets, she shakes, she looks at the door, she is somewhere between aroused and anxious.

And then he’s back, dropping a couple of small bottles onto the ground with a clink – more alcohol? She could use some – and holding something else by his side. Apparently he went for supplies. “Lie down,” he says, still curt.

“I thought we just discussed how obedience isn’t my forte,” she says, taunting him, a red rag to a bull. Does she want him to erupt into violence? She doesn’t know. The mad rush would be familiar, at least. She’s not sure what to make of this cold, quiet rage. She hates that her body seems to know exactly what to think – she’s already throbbing with need.

He doesn’t bother to repeat himself, simply looks at her, gaze icy and implacable. She swallows hard again, forces herself to move her arms away from her body so she feels less like she is hiding from him, and lies down on the bed, loose hair cushioning her head as much as the flat pillow does. She is splayed before him, cold and naked, and she can feel his eyes on her and closes her own to stop herself from reaching out to draw him to her.

Then his hands are bracketing her wrists, pulling them together and slamming them against the mattress, and she thinks he’s about to lean down and kiss her and arches up to meet him, relieved. Instead she feels the rough scrape of rope against her wrists as he ties them together, then knots the end of the rope around the pole at the head of the bed. She pulls at it once, then again, suddenly almost afraid. “Athos,” she says, voice a thread.

He raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”

But she doesn’t know what to say. “I could get free of these in moments,” she says eventually, false bravado in her voice. She won’t try, but she _could_.

“You’d regret it if you did,” he says, but he doesn’t say why, and not knowing worries her more than a stated threat could. The known she can mock, but the unknown is blank and terrifying. He runs a gloved finger down her body, starting with the hollow at her throat, just below her scar. It traces a line between her breasts as if he is bisecting her, moves down her taut stomach, the curls at the base of her legs, and – so quickly and indifferently that she is almost sure he has no reaction to it at all – down the wet, needy seam of her. She gasps and arches into it, a moan choked in her throat, but he’s already moved away.

He curves his body over hers and she keeps her legs locked together, not sure what to think of his strange mood, wary of it and of him. She is naked while he is clothed, she is bound while he is free, and she is nervous while he is angry – she has not felt so helpless since she was on her knees before him and he shocked her half out of senses by sparing her life. She had not thought him capable of sparing her, she had thought that of the two of them, she was the only one so desperately lost in the past that sometimes it felt like taking her revenge on him might kill her just as surely.

She doesn’t think he’ll spare her today, but that’s a different thing entirely.

“Spread,” he says, deceptively mild, and when she does not he gives a slight shrug, as if to say, on your own head be it. He pries her legs apart with rough hands anyway, and part of her relishes his roughness. He takes one thigh hard in each and simply slams them to the bed so she is open to his gaze. She tries not to moan as he studies her, examining her cunt with almost impersonal interest. Then he leans forward and licks a soft stripe up her slit.

She would lift off the bed with the force of her reaction if he wasn’t holding her down. Mother of God, she’d forgotten what his mouth felt like on her, the things his tongue could do, the feel of his beard scratching against her sensitive inner thighs. The noise that tears out of her throat is closer to a shriek than a moan, and he doesn’t stop, licking into her over and over again, devouring her cunt hungrily. His tongue alternates between hard on her clit and circling around the rest of her, pausing once to delve deeply into her, and she pushes herself into his mouth and loses herself in it, head thumping against the bed as she writhes against the feel of him.

She is shuddering on the brink, his tongue all the sensation in the world, blood boiling her veins, when he abruptly pulls away. She pushes up against air and nothing at all, an agonised moan erupting from her, so close she can taste the pleasure in the back of her throat. Her eyes water with the force of it. “What?” she manages, trying to push up again, but there’s nothing to grind against, no friction to find. She can’t even try to press her thighs together to relieve the ache since he’s still holding her open. “Don’t stop!”

“I don’t reward disobedience,” he says, voice dark. “How would you learn that way?”

“You bastard, don’t you dare -”

“Careful,” He warns her. “If I don’t reward disobedience, how do you think I’ll react to outright disrespect?”

That should shut her up, but she’s never had much sense. “You Christ-fucking son of a-”

His grip on her thighs tightens and he uses it to flip her, forcing her onto her front, one of his hands moving afterwards to the small of her back to keep her pressed there. “Now, how does one go about punishing a rebellious wife? Oh, yes.”

The hand stays on the small of her back. She cannot move, hands above her head, half-choking on her own hair, aroused beyond measure. There’s a pause and a small noise she doesn’t recognise, and she realises a second later that he was pulling his other glove off with his teeth as his now bare hand strokes her ass. The feeling of skin against skin is electrifying. He runs his fingers lightly across the left cheek, then across the right, and she knows what he’s going to do. They have done it before in Pinon, giggling and playful, her squealing like a girl and him planting kisses on her after every smack. This does not feel like that. There’s a darkness to it that enthrals her even as it terrified her.

“I’ll scream,” she threatens, breath shaky with need and nerves, not meaning it for a moment. “People will come.”

“And I’ll tell them the truth – I’m simply disciplining my disobedient wife. You’ll only gain yourself an interested audience,” he angles her body up a bit and licks into her again, this time from behind, slow and sweet, and she writhes against his tongue helplessly. “But if you want me to leave, all you have to do is ask me to, and I’ll be gone.”

He pauses for an excessively long time, purely to embarrass her. They both know she’ll say no such thing. Whatever he does to her, she will never tell him to go, because she cannot bear to make him leave any more than she can bear to walk away herself. When she said until death, she meant it – both times.

He moves so that he is on her legs, pinning them down, gloved hand holding her torso motionless as well, and then his bare hand smacks down on her ass so loudly the sound seems to echo through the room. She hears the noise before she feels the shock of pain, and to her surprise it is painful, his hand held just right to deliver the perfect sting. He alternates, delivering four stinging slaps to each cheek, and she finds herself crying out by the last, trying to squirm away from it and revelling in it at the same time, her body confused by the combination of pain and pleasure, each one intensifying the other until there is no space in her mind to think at all.

“Apologise,” he says, and she hates how bored he sounds, how indifferent.

She says nothing, and receives another four, thrashing against him as he delivers them, angry to and embarrassed realise she is half-sobbing, not just with discomfort and embarrassment but with something else. She can’t help but writhe at every blow, the sudden impact of it sending a flash of heat through her body even as it hurts, and she can’t stop herself from feeling shamed by her lustful reaction to the chastisement. He is punishing her like she is a small child, not the formidable woman she knows herself to be, and yet she can’t stop herself from reacting to it. Every strike feels like it travels through her whole body and then lands at her cunt. 

“Apologise,” he says, but this time he breathes it, moving down again, and his tongue is against her again from behind. He parts her sore cheeks with strong fingers, angling her just right so he can lick into her cunt. This time he gives her three strong, perfectly aimed licks, sending pleasure slamming through her like yet another blow, and then he pulls back yet again before she can even really process the need that races through her. She tries to push back, even more on edge than she was before, her ass aching from his hand, her cunt aching from the absence of his mouth.

He pushes her right to the edge twice more, until she’s sobbing with it. In between he delivers another five slaps, leaving her ass feeling as raw and oversensitive as her cunt, and by the end she’s sobbing in earnest, no longer standing on her pride, willing to say almost anything if he’ll just let her come. He doesn’t ask her to apologise again, though.

“You can’t do this for long,” she says when he gives her enough of a break to think, and is shocked by how weak her voice sounds, shocked by how choked up she is. She wants him to lick into her again. She wants him to smack her again. She wants him to do both at once and drive her to what will surely be one of the greatest orgasms she’s ever experienced.

“No?”

“No,” she says, striving for triumph. The best she can manage is a kind of weak, bitter satisfaction. “You must be hard as a rock. Sooner or later you’re going to want to thrust home, aren’t you? You’re going to _need_ to.” She gives a deliberate twist of her hips and is pleased to hear his breath catch.

“You’re right,” he says roughly. “So I suppose I’ll have to take care of that, then.”

She can’t see him pull open his trousers, but in moments she feels the head of his cock drag through her soft folds. She gasps, wriggling against him, amazed that he’s given her this victory so quickly, but then he moves away and she’s left wondering what his plans are.

Athos doesn’t leave her to wonder long. He’s flipping her over again, shuffling up her body so he’s kneeling over her head instead, his cock hard and angry-looking as he presses it against her lips. “Open,” he hisses, but she keeps them closed, because if he won’t give her a victory she’s damned if she’ll give him one this easily in return. He grabs her hair, twists it in his grip, forcing her head off the pillow, and she shudders as the sting of it travels down her body. “I said _open_.”

Now she does. She wants him to keep being a bit rough, wants it badly enough that her body feels hotter and more empty than it’s ever felt, but she also wants to make him earn every single concession she allows. It feels better to give in after a struggle.

“Good,” he says, and she shudders at the praise, at the half-smile on his face.

He pushes his cock into her mouth with a sigh of relief, and starts thrusting slowly. She has no way to control him or stop him if he goes too deep and chokes her, but he doesn’t, just rocks against her face with little rough movements, holding her there, with him heavy and thick and unstoppable inside her mouth. She sucks at him greedily, curving her tongue around his shaft and laving at it as she tries to draw him deeper, unable to stop herself, tasting him and herself.

“In you or on you?” he asks. If his voice was rough before, now it’s like sandpaper, and she nearly moans as heat races through her at the query.

She can’t reply, not with his cock nearly down her throat, but despite the question he doesn’t seem that interested in her input. When he comes he makes her swallow every drop – well, nearly every drop, as he pulls away she can feel a dribble slide down the side of her mouth to her chin. She automatically tries to follow him with her mouth, sticking her tongue out and opening up as if to suck him back into her again and devour him further, but he ignores her, moving away. After a moment she closes her eyes instead, savouring the taste of him, possibly more aroused than she’s ever been in her life.

Now he’s taken care of his need, though, he can return to the original problem of her intractability. He spreads her wide again, tongue probing, fingers starting to work her as well. You’d think he’d be sick of the taste of her by now but he licks into her with every bit as much concentration as he had the first time he took her to the edge and left her there. His fingers make it worse, though, and she can’t stop herself from moving against him, from moaning, even though she knows he won’t let her finish. She quickly loses count of the number of times he brings her right to the edge, the bastard, and when she cracks it is a complete breakdown, her dignity destroyed, crying and pleading, desperately needy, unable to stop herself.

“I’m sorry,” she sobs, arching against him, not even remembering what she’s apologising for. She doubts he remembers either.

“Of course you are, now.” He licks harder against her clit, and two fingers drive her mad from the inside, stroking at just the right angle to make her crazy. Again he pulls back as she is helpless on the brink. “But I think it will take more time for the lesson to stick.”

His fingers play in her wetness, and then he moves them further back, taking the slickness to her other hole. With one finger, he rubs against it, and she jerks against the touch helplessly. Then he pushes it inside her, just barely enough wetness there to keep the discomfort manageable, and her mind fractures under the pleasure and slight pain together as he gives another lick to her overstimulated clit. “Oh, _OH!_ ”

“You always did like that,” he observes, a little distantly, as if he really is studying her.

His weight disappears off her for a moment and she just lies there, mind blank with need, pressing her wet thighs together, the friction making everything worse. She moans and arches against nothing, so sensitive every motion is torture, and she opens her eyes to watch him.

It seems one of the little bottles he brought was oil, and as she watches he pours some into his hand. “Turn over again,” he says, and she does without question, not even needing his urging now. It’s been a long time since someone did this with her, and far longer since it was done well – since him, in fact. He pours more of the oil onto her, some of the droplets landing on the reddened, painful spots where he spanked her, the rest pooling where he’s aimed it, slowly dripping lower. The bed will be a wreck by the time they’re done.

He pushes one finger hard into her and she loses all control of her body for a moment, trying to rub her clit against the sheets, trying to push back so his finger goes deeper. “ _Yes_ ,” she whimpers without meaning to.

“You’d tell me anything I want, now,” he notes.

“Yes,” she sobs, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, more, please, I’m sorry…”

He gives her a second finger slowly in return. He doesn’t ask what she has to sell that’s worth a hundred livres, though. Perhaps he still doesn’t believe she really knows anything, or perhaps he instinctively recognises that to steal that from her here, now, in this way, would be crossing some kind of line.

“Well then. Tell me,” he says conversationally, two fingers inside her, scissoring gently, opening up the tight ring of muscle further. “Do you touch yourself?”

“Do I…” it’s a struggle to think, with his fingers moving like that. “What? Of course I do, of course -”

“And do you think of me when you do?”

“Only you, I only ever -” she lets out a gasp of shock as he inserts a third finger without warning.

“Liar.” His voice has thickened with arousal. It’s been some time since he took her mouth, and since he’s spent that time torturing her so pleasurably, he must be nearly ready to take her again.

“No, it’s the truth, I swear,” she says, voice still choked from sobbing. She must look a mess, ass glowing red from his slaps, lips swollen and his come on her face from when he took her mouth, sweating and wet with her own need, bruises from the other night still patterning her flesh. She pulls helplessly at the ropes tying her, even the rub of it against her wrists causing another surge of lust, and tries not to sob again. “I only ever think of you, Athos, for fuck’s sake. Only you since the moment I met you.”

All three fingers are working her now, and she feels splayed open, desperately turned on just from knowing what he’s about to do. And then his fingers are gone and the rounded head of his cock is pushing insistently against her ass and she turns her head to bite into the thin pillow, her mind not entirely prepared for her to be stretched like that even though her body is more than ready.

She’s still quite tight and he has to work his way in a little, the push of him inside her making her almost uncomfortable full, and she hisses helplessly into the pillow as he does it. He sounds like he’s stifling a cry of his own at the sensation of being so tightly clenched within her. He reaches his hand around slightly clumsily, pushing the heel roughly against her clit, and she gasps and moans and clenches her teeth to the point of pain all at once, overwhelmed, seeing stars bursting against the back of her eyelids, nearly coming just from that.

Then he’s in her entirely, groaning at how tight she is, and she feels the pressure reverberating through her. She’s so turned on that any friction is amazing and agonising at the same time, and he rubs his hand against her oversensitive clit, and he rocks inside her, and all the pressure and tightness and heat drives her wild, jolting against him with every little movement, the tightly twisted arousal building and building and _building_ as he moves, and then she comes so hard she almost passes out, crying out at the overwhelming surge of pleasure.

He keeps moving through it, keeps taking her, and she can hear him let out a soft curse near her ear, and she’s still gasping harshly into the mattress, her body heaving, her eyes shut so tight they sting. And every little movement he makes sends that insane shock through her again. Her breath is so ragged that her lungs burn with the force of her gasping, and when she opens her eyes the world is blurred and overbright, and when she says “ _Please_ ” again her voice is an incomprehensible croak, raw from her yelling and pleading.

Somehow he knows what she needs, though, because he says in a voice nearly as wrecked as hers, “Are you sure?” and she must say or do something to convince him that she is sure, because his free hand lands down on her with another stinging smack, and again, rocking his body so he drives into her in time with the blows. She comes again in moments, a choked scream escaping her, waves of pleasure overwhelming her. A dozen sensations are devastating her body all at once: the tight throb of him stretching her from behind, her wrists rubbing against the rope, the full weight of his body forcing her down into the mattress, her nipples hard against the rough bedding, one callused hand pressing hard against her clit, the other landing against her sore ass repeatedly in a series of sharp stings, pain somehow amplifying pleasure immeasurably. Jesus Christ, how is it possible to live through something like this, she wonders wildly, it feels like her body should shatter at the force of it, and she wants it to shatter again, because she wants him to keep moving.

He rolls them onto their sides, so that instead of his hand being trapped beneath her body and the mattress he can move it more freely, can touch her more freely, and she lets out a noise that’s barely human as he manages to angle his hand to push two fingers inside of her cunt. She’s so very full, his cock from behind, his fingers from in front, and somehow he’s managing to still rub the heel of his hand clumsily against her clit, and she feels him jerk as he starts to come deep inside her, and her third orgasm hits so hard that this time she actually does pass out for a few moments.

When she manages to prise open her eyes again, she’s untied, and he is leaning against the wall across the room, clothes repaired, wearing his hat lowered to hide his face. When he raises his gaze to her she recognises the expression in it – it’s guilt. She should play on it, use it to get him to go to Treville, to give her a hundred livres, but instead she rolls her eyes at him. “Oh, come on, Athos. Really?”

“I should not have -” he starts to say hoarsely.

“There’s a lot of things we shouldn’t have done,” she says, sitting up. She no longer feels self-conscious in her nakedness, not after everything they just did. She rolls her shoulders, feeling the way her body aches and stings and buzzes, a hundred times more alive than she was before he touched her, but exhausted anyway. She badly needs to clean herself up, but this seems like the kind of place that won’t even have a shared towel, let alone one just for her. “Now stop torturing yourself, we both know you enjoy it more when I do that.”

This time he manages a weak smile. “Right now I’m not sure I could enjoy anything.”

“Yes, that wore me out a bit too,” she admits, although she’s quietly pleased with how composed she sounds, as if she wasn’t just tied up and spanked and fucked and taken to the edge and left a dozen times. A part of her wants to curl up and let herself very slowly regain the rest of her composure, but instead she pushes herself to sound bright and indifferent, because that’s what’s best.

“I have balm as well,” he mutters after a long, awkward pause. “Not just oil.” He holds it up, almost apologetic.

“Well, then,” she says, taking charge. “Come and put it on me.”

They use up the greater part of the small bottle, and she’s not sure if it numbs the discomfort in her wrists or behind, but she does enjoy the feeling of him smoothing it over her skin. She can’t say she feels a surge of desire when he does – she thinks having come so hard so recently, it might be hours before she’s recovered enough to be able to take more stimulation – but she can feel heat beginning to hum through her veins again despite that. There is something else, though, apart from that, unrelated to the need: she feels quietly comforted by his gentleness, by the softness of his hands on her. He even kisses her shoulder at one point, a quiet, chaste gesture that is surprisingly affectionate.

“You should go,” she says eventually, stealing his line, but her voice is soft and she puts a hand on his arm for a second, a little, comforting touch.

He hesitates, then finally nods and does, and she dresses in blissfully empty silence, still trying to figure out what’s going on. He’d been icy with anger and heartbreak, and she’d been sharp with fury and pain, and then he had taken all his feelings out on her body, and she had sobbed her own feelings out in desperation, and now she is no longer sure what she feels or what he feels or what the hell is going on.

The barkeeper gives her a rather impressed look on the way out.


	7. 2x09: The Naked Truth

They are walking through the streets together. In one way, they are close enough to touch, but in another, the distance between them may as well be miles. He doesn’t know what to say. It’s been an intense few hours.

First there was Catherine, and he never imagined that the indifference he always felt for her could be elevated to actual anger, but apparently it can. Then, Anne standing there – undoubtedly Anne, his Anne, the same dignified, contemptuous expression on her face he remembers from the first time she was hanged – talking about Thomas. And then later, his urgent question, _Do you still maintain my brother tried to rape you?_ and her voice nearly breaking on the answer, a woman destroyed, _why would I lie about it?_

That felt like a body blow, hearing those words, even after her stark, harsh statements to Catherine. Apart from when she spoke of Thomas, she’d been nothing but painfully honest, spouting truths that didn’t benefit her at all, absolving Athos of saving her, trying to clear him in Catherine’s eyes. If she wanted to stop Catherine from killing her, it would have been better to claim Athos saved her and might even want revenge on Catherine for her murder. The same applied if she was trying to anger Catherine so she would make a mistake. Better to lie. There was no reason to tell the truth, except perhaps pride in herself.

And what reason did she have to lie about Thomas now? Why make your last words a lie? She couldn’t have believed she could change Catherine’s mind about Thomas. If her words were to anger Catherine, why not anger her further with other lies, with lies about Athos and her, or even with lies about Thomas’s feelings for Catherine? He knows Milady could have come up with far crueller statements to break Catherine then the old one, the one Catherine would never credit. His mind turns in circles and his heart aches and he betrays his brother by allowing himself to truly believe for the first time that Anne was telling the truth. Thomas tried to force her. He finds, to his surprise, that part of him always did believe it, and that he’s been fighting against that knowledge for years.

When he lets himself think it, some things make no sense – how could Thomas believe he would get away with forcing her? Did he think to blackmail Anne with what he knew, or was he carried away by rage at what she’d done? Whose knife was it and why did they bring it to that room? Why try to rape another woman with your betrothed so close by? Other things, though, finally do make sense. He’s no detective, but sometimes on long nights little details niggled at him. Such as, if the murder of Thomas was pre-planned and in cold blood, why would Anne come up with a method that would get her immediately caught and tried? Why did Thomas not come straight to Athos if he found out Anne was not who she claimed to be, instead of speaking with Anne first? Why did Anne not destroy the letter before he or Catherine got to the room instead of standing there frozen? And again, why do it with Catherine so close by, ready to condemn her? Thomas and Anne had lived in the same house, after all. A woman with even some of the skills of Milady de Winter could easily have snuck into Thomas’s bedroom and smothered or poisoned him in his sleep and never been suspected. Certainly, without the letter confirming that there was no Anne de Breuil and never had been, it would not have crossed his mind to consider his wife a murderer.

But if she didn’t kill Thomas in cold blood. If it wasn’t a murder. If it was self defence. Then what Athos did, six years ago? That _was_ murder. Plain and simple. Nothing to hide behind. Someone lying to you and hurting you was not grounds for a hanging. He had taken a shocked and traumatised woman who just survived a rape attempt, a woman who still had blood on her hands from her desperate defence of herself, and thrown her alone into a cell with the harsh advice to prepare for her own death. He'd destroyed her, and he'd destroyed himself, and there is no one else to blame.

Her words about Thomas hadn’t been the only body blow, either. In some ways, they hadn’t even been the worst. When he accused her, when he cried out that she lied about everything else, her response struck him hard. _You would never have married me if you’d known the truth about my past!_

It might be true that he would not have married her, he does not know, but that doesn’t absolve her of lying about it. He deserved honesty, at least enough honesty to know who he married, to make that choice. It wasn’t that part which hit him at his core, though, it was the lies Anne referred to, lies about her past. Only her past. She had not said she was desperate for money and security, so she needed to captivate him, to ensnare him, to use him. Hadn’t spoken of faking her passion, her personality, her sense of humour, her emotions, her interests. Hadn’t mentioned faking her love for him. He had said she lied about everything, but the only lie she thought worth mentioning was the one about her past, and for the first time Athos considers the possibility that the only lies she had ever told were the ones in that letter. Her name, her family, and what she did before meeting him – huge lies, but nothing like the ones he has imagined, nothing like a woman and a love story made up of whole cloth, nothing like months and months of kisses and declarations and playing in meadows being only an elaborate con.

And that… horribly, that makes sense too. He is getting to know her, now, he thinks, and under the cold cruel face Milady de Winter wears into battle like armour there is still an Anne de Breuil – endlessly amused by the world and its foibles, easily made happy by small joys like a gown, a flower, or a drink, passionate, impulsive, intelligent, and irresistible. He didn’t fall in love with a woman who had never existed. He fell for a woman who is even now walking next to him, a woman he betrayed and tried to kill, a woman who betrayed and tried to kill him, a woman he kissed tonight as if it is six years ago and he still wears his heart on his sleeve. Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess.

“Sou for your thoughts?” she says idly. She is shivering in the cool night air.

He tries to force a smile, knows it comes out lopsided and weary. “I don’t imagine they’re worth that much.”

She studies him, but lets it pass.

That kiss, though. What they’ve been doing lately has been raw, but it has been raw need. That was… something else, something equally as raw but much less base, though he doesn’t know quite how to explain it. Perhaps it’s as simple as admitting that while lately, Athos the musketeer and Milady de Winter have been fucking, tonight, the Comte de la Fere kissed his wife. With passionate need and something approaching desperation, yes, but also with six years of love and heartbreak on the tip of his tongue.

But… no, that’s still not quite right either. Maybe the Comte and Comtesse de la Fere didn’t die as completely as Athos thought, but that doesn’t mean that he and the woman walking beside him are still those people. He knows a hundred things about Milady de Winter he never knew about Anne de Breuil. She keeps a cool head when she’s in danger, she’s worth half a dozen Musketeers in combat, she goes for the throat in arguments, she’s incredibly difficult to deal with, she’s full of anger and venom, she uses her body as a weapon, and she doesn’t lie when the truth can cause more damage. It’s likely some of those traits existed in Anne de Breuil and were simply hidden, but others are the result of these past six years. She’s changed. He’s changed as well. They’re somehow both less and more than they once were. And yet, they still fit together, somehow, jagged edges matching, seeking each other out, missing each other, wanting each other.

The Comte de le Fere used to love the warm sense of contentment and love he got when he saw his wife, but Athos the Musketeer is addicted to the shot of adrenaline he gets when Milady de Winter sashays into the room. She makes him feel alive. He’s a fencer and there is no one he’d prefer to cross swords with, no opponent who challenges him half as much, but these days their matches have been slowly changing from battles to the death to sparring sessions and he’s enjoyed that even more, as much as he’s tried to hate it, as much as he’s fought against it. And now they’ve shifted to this hazy halfway place, nothing like the sweetly affectionate Comte and Comtesse de la Fere, but still nowhere near the two cruel, snapping beasts tearing strips of each other that they used to resemble. They are somewhere in between, some combination of both and neither at the same time, and Athos can’t decide if that’s sick or merely strange.

“Come home with me,” he says abruptly, but he doesn’t know how to explain that he wants something different, so he doesn’t add anything to it.

She regards him thoughtfully, but stays silent, just giving one decisive nod. 

He reaches out for her arm. He is ready to be knocked back, like when she refused to let him keep her safe and out of the fight, like when she had pushed his coin purse against his chest, like when she removed her hand from under his in that tavern. Instead, she lets him take it as if he really is the Comte again, and he is escorting her back to their house.

When they reach the garrison, she slips into his room without asking him which one it is, apparently willing to wait while he lets everyone else know what happened. He stumbles through his explanations, but luckily the others are more concerned with what’s happening then with his emotional problems, so no one enquires. He is almost curt. He is worried about Aramis, of course he is, but there is nothing more they can do today and she is waiting for him. He strides back to his room when he is done, almost panicking as he wonders if she is still there, but thank God, he can see a faint glow emanating from the crack at the bottom of the door. When he opens it, there she still is, sitting on his bed, hands clasped in her lap, the picture of composure.

In the light of the candle, her face is pale, and the bared scar on her neck is red.

He’s never kissed her scars during their brief interludes: he thinks now that he knew on some level that it would be an insult at best, and a sacrilege at worst. If he kisses them, what is he saying? Is he saying he thinks she’s beautiful even with them? Of course he does, she is, but to say that would be to act as though the scars are a disfigurement he can graciously ignore, to praise her beauty despite them instead of because of them. To act as though they are part of her beauty, adding to her complexity, is even worse, because he is the one who gave those scars. Another man could admiringly tell her that they show her strength, her ability to survive, that they make her beauty more mesmerizing instead of less, but he cannot. If he tells her the marks make her fascinating instead of flawed, it would seem as if he is proud of what he has done. A worshipful gesture to the marks of violence he’s inflicted upon her… he can’t comprehend how to do that in a way that isn’t horrifying.

It also makes him feel guilty on another level to even think of it, guilty that he still wants to kiss her there, wants to kiss her everywhere again, wants every part of her, even the damage and the darkness. He believes now that she had reason to kill Thomas, but she’s undoubtedly killed dozens of other men in cold blood, including Remi and the Spanish ambassador. He has no business feeling this way about her, and he betrays his ideals again every time he sees her and fails to even attempt to punish her for the murders she’s committed. But then, those killings are on his head too, aren’t they, according to her? After all, he committed the first murder. Maybe she’s right. He’s a failure as a husband, a failure as an executioner, and above all a failure as a man. Anne would doubtless agree with the self-assessment.

How can anyone survive wishing a hundred opposing things simultaneously? He wants it to be six years ago and he wants to kiss her hard and he wants her to be gone and he wants to hate her again and he wants to have believed her back then and he wants to be free of her and he wants to never let her go and he wants to never have met her… or, well, perhaps he doesn’t want that last one, not at all, however hard he’s tried to. But he wants everything else, all at once. He needs her to leave so can retain his equilibrium, that peaceful place where he drinks too much and says too little and will (with any luck) die too young, hopefully protecting his brothers. He needs to breathe in the air of Paris and for once not smell her fucking perfume. He needs to not be crushed by the weight of his guilt and his want and his hatred.

And at the same time he needs her to stay because without her, he is lost.

“Well?” she says eventually, tilting her head. The tilt is familiar to him, as familiar as her smirk, as her frown, as her sob, as her raised eyebrow, as her laughter. But he no longer flinches to see it, because now he remembers it is not a monster wearing his wife’s face, but his wife. She stands and moves towards him, a real smile curving on her lips, and that is familiar too.

“Well,” he manages, but doesn’t move.

She gives an annoyed sigh, loses her patience entirely, rolls her eyes. “For God’s sake, Athos. Would you hurry up? I’ve been ready since that kiss, and honestly, what kind of husband pushes his wife against a wall like that and doesn’t finish the -”

“I – I have every intention of – I just -”

“Use your words,” she gives him that mocking smile he has loathed for so long. He can tell she’s confused why he’s acting so differently – he’s given her no reason to think she won’t be being roughly pushed against the nearest surface whenever they’re alone together. It’s just how they interact now. His guilt intensifies.

He breathes, he uses his words. “I’m just… savouring the moment. Holding it in my memory.” He reaches for her hand, brings it to his lips, and kisses the centre of her palm slowly.

She lets her eyes slide closed for a moment at the sensation, enjoying it. Then, when he lets go of her, she opens them halfway, considering him carefully, taking in everything with her hooded gaze. “Memories are all very well. But right now, I would prefer to make them instead of dwell on them, if that is alright.”

The moment is strangely tense, a million unsaid words hovering between them.

He swallows hard, mesmerised by the arch of her eyebrows, the expression in her eyes. When she regards him in that thoughtful, almost dreamy way, he forgets how to exist: forgets how to breathe, to blink, to move. She looks realer like this, somehow, tired and worn after a long day. He has a thousand things he should say to her, should never say to her, should never even admit to himself, but his mouth is dry and her skin is far too covered up and it seems the only move within his power to make is the one that pulls her into his arms.

He wants it to be a sweet, soft kiss, but she opens her mouth at the first touch of his and then he is immediately lost, slanting his mouth over hers, sucking at her lip, his whole body heated by the feel of her own warmth so close. His hands travel restlessly, groping at her backside and squeezing her narrow waist and trying to caress her breasts through her corsetry. He pulls off her long cloak and undoes her belt without any issue but the rest of her dress is hard and unforgiving, not allowing him to so much as feel the shape of the soft curves he longs to possess. He pulls futilely at her bodice for a moment, letting out a frustrated noise when he realises the dress is too tightly tied to free her breasts to his hungry gaze. He wants to lick at the curves of them, taste the impossible softness he dreams of, draw her nipples into his mouth and work them to tightness. He can’t.

“Easy,” she murmurs, reaching up to loosen the laces, and her fingers are quick and sure and in moments the dress is on the ground and he is kissing her again, breaking it for only a moment to pull his shirt over his head, though even that seems too long. She moans into his kiss at the feel of calloused hands on her bare skin, goose bumps erupting up and down her arms. And then his hands stray to her ass again and from there to her thighs. To his surprise, she tangles her fingers in his hair and pulls his head down to her neck, down to the lines of redness he hasn’t dared touch, that there are so many reasons he shouldn’t touch.

“I’m sorry,” he says, lips against her neck, and he doesn’t know if he’s saying sorry for Catherine, sorry for the scars he left five years ago, sorry for not believing her, sorry for everything. “I’m so sorry.” 

“On any other day, I assure you, I could have dealt with her,” she sniffs, assuming it is the first one.

He is a coward, so he lets her. “I still shouldn’t have told her about you. I’m sorry.”

“So you should be. I liked that necklace,” she says with a put-upon sigh, and he feels a flash of guilt, but he can see that she’s just teasing him. “I expect you to apologise profusely.”

He reaches for her, hands brushing down her sides to settle at her hips, tracing the impossibly perfect curve of her waist. She’s trying to look annoyed but however good an actress she is, the attempt is too half-hearted to work, not when he has his mouth pressed against the throbbing, speeding pulse in her neck, not when he can feel the insistent pressure of her hands in his hair forcing him back to her throat. He kisses her neck again, kisses the scars the way she seems to want him to, but it’s too much to face, too much to process. He can feel the lump in his throat growing as his lips find the curved line of roughness on her smooth pale skin, grief and shame and horrible guilt choking him like a rope, and if he continues to kiss her there he will break down in her arms and the very last thing he wants to do right now is force his victim to comfort him for what he did to her, so he stops. Even so, he can still feel that red, coarse line on his tongue like a brand.

She closes her eyes as he leans down, finds her breasts with his mouth, and teases her nipples into tight buds. This, at least, he can do. He feels her shiver against his touch, her hands twisting in his short hair, her fingers digging into his scalp.

“How much did you like the necklace?” he says, voice low against her warm skin, trying to lighten the mood, trying to pull them back from the pit he’s been trying so hard to avoid falling into ever since she came back into his life. “As much as this?” 

“Hmm,” she says teasingly, but she can’t hide how breathless she is. “I don’t know.”

He rasps his tongue against her nipple, making her gasp, and then goes to his knees with a thump, sliding his hand slowly up her leg to find her wet and wanting, wet and wanting for him, for his touch. “Did you like it as much as _this_?” he says, and leans forward to lick a very gentle stripe up the seam of her.

She gasps, eyes going unfocused for a second. “Not quite,” she says, but now her voice jumps and lurches with need, and when he gives a little suck of her clit she moans in earnest, swaying on her feet at the feeling of it.

He’s thought of her as a serpent, a tiger, a scorpion, a hundred other things. Thief, murderess, liar, whore, he’s used those as well. He’s spent years trying to define her with one cruel word, to lock her up in a box he can deal with, but right now, all those words fall away. She’s too human, like this, too open, for those words to stick. Instead, clawing its way up from the darkest, most secret, most shameful part of his mind, the only word that he thinks when he has her like this is, _Mine_ , the thought that’s come to his head too often these past weeks. Even though she’d be more likely to slap him for that than any of the others, and she’d be right to. _My wife._

_Mine_ he thinks at the taste of her, giving her another of those soft licks before pulling back, and one more, and just one more, until he loses count, _mine_ as her legs go unsteady and she all but collapses to the floor next to him, shuddering with want, _mine_ as he kisses her with the taste of her own need still vibrant on his tongue and she groans into his mouth. _Mine_ , as she pulls his hand to the junction of her legs, _mine_ as she moans. And “Mine,” he whispers unsteadily against her, without meaning to, as he rubs his finger against her hard clit and feels her jolt against him.

She makes a little choked noise in response, spreading her legs further, pushing back against his touch, wanting more. She’s trying to straddle him but he doesn’t want this to escalate so quickly, not when he wants to keep touching her, not when he can’t stop touching her. But he won’t control her either, he can’t be rough and cruel and domineering, not now, not with her like this.

He wants to keep her crushed against his chest so there isn’t an inch between them, but he also wants to explore with his hands, so he shifts her bodily so that she’s seated on his lap facing the other way, one hand delving into her wetness and the other playing with one hard nipple, her back pressed to his front. She squirms against him and feeling the soft curves of her ass against his cock nearly drives him wild, but he does his best to ignore it, to focus on her. He keeps his touch light, plays with her breasts, maps out her stomach with his hands, her arms, her collarbones, her thighs, her cunt. She tries to turn, once, but he lets his hands drop just as lightly to her hips, not physically holding her there but sending a quiet plea for her to stay, and to his amazement she heeds it. She twists her neck to kiss him, hard, but otherwise gives in to his explorations, letting him caress every inch of her skin, letting him rememorise every curve and every plane.

“Please,” she gasps eventually. “Please, just…” She wriggles a little in his lap, deliberately rubbing herself against his cock.

For a needy second he considers lining himself up and dropping her onto him, thrusting up into her as she continues writhing on top of him, but he wants this to last longer than that would give him so instead he picks her up off his lap and carries her to the bed, the way he once carried his new bride to their marriage bed. It feels exactly the same as he remembers: pure joy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently my mind works like this: all those episodes where basically no one thought they were having sex, I'm gonna write them having sex! And the one episode where everyone thinks they probably did have sex, I'm going to focus more on Athos being super angsty and full of regrets than anything else. Why not!


	8. 2x10: Release and Catch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The below is not at all canonical, because I object to sad endings even when they're theoretically meaningful or satisfying. It's also kind of fluffy and soppy (I think I'm far worse at writing people being emotionally honest with each other than I am at writing them arguing).

For the first time in more than six years, she let herself be vulnerable. She was open. She was honest. She spoke her mind.

It was fucking awful. She hated it.

She hates it still, as she sits here, in her pretty dress and in her nice carriage. The coachman thinks she’s mad – he’s thought it for quite some time now, in fact. She can see it in his face every time she leaps out of the carriage again, heart thumping uncontrollably in her chest, breath turning shaky at the sound of hooves. Rider after rider has passed, and obviously, they are not Athos.

Perhaps it’s understandable. English weather, English food, an ultimatum from his worst enemy… most men would shy back from that. But Athos is not most men, and she loves him even more than she hates him, and for some reason she believed he would be here. If he gave a similar ultimatum, she would crawl on her hands and knees to get there if that is what it took. It’s a humiliating admission to make, even in the privacy of her own head. But it is true, and apparently that is her new thing: telling the truth, damning the consequences.

If she was still allowing herself to lie, she could have said to meet her at the crossroads for a goodbye he would never forget. Not many men could refuse that offer. She wouldn’t have had her husband with her for the trip to England if she said that, but since it looks like she won’t have him anyway, it might have been worth it. Now the goodbye she has is not sweaty, angry sex in a rocking carriage. It’s the two of them wrapped around each other, sweet endearments dripping off their lips, making slow, soft love long into the night.

God, any of the memories of the two of them fighting as much as fucking would be a better last memory than that. She doesn’t want to remember her husband’s worshipful touches and adoring expression. The other memories are things she can and will use to bring herself off when she wakes in the night, hot with need and the shame that need brings. But the other night? That will only ever bring her to tears.

There’s another rider approaching. Her heart rises, she breathes in sharply, she leaves the coach, she looks: her heart falls, she lets her breath out in a sigh, she returns to the coach. And she is, abruptly, done. There is a limit to what she can take, and apparently, this is it. She can’t have it hammered home over and over and _over_ again that her husband does not love her. She can’t keep getting her hopes up, not when each let down is twice as painful as the one before. Another half dozen riders and she’ll cry. She never cries.

“Head on,” she tells the coachman, and her voice is a dead thing. He gives a nod, stops petting the horses’ noses, and gets them on their way with quick professionalism. Milady tries to fix her dress – it’s in disarray after all the times she’s leapt out of the carriage to stare hopelessly down the road – but her gloved hands are too clumsy. She removes the gloves and tries again, realising only then that it wasn’t the fault of the gloves – she is trembling. She tries to breathe evenly, tries to calm herself, refuses to let herself give in to emotion, tells herself it is all the fault of the fancy dress instead of her weakness. Perhaps she should stop in Le Havre and try and hire a maid. She can afford to, now.

She stares blindly out the window. It’s a lovely day, the scenery is lovely, her dress is lovely, her hair is lovely, everything is lovely. She has no patron to answer to. The law is not hunting her. Her bag is heavy with livres. She’s leaving behind a place where she will only ever be viewed as a killer and heading out into a brand-new start, even if it’s hard to picture exactly what that new start will entail. She couldn’t really have been naïve enough to think she would get Athos as well as all of that.

Even if Athos is the one thing she wants more than all of that put together.

They have been going for perhaps an hour and she has given herself a headache suppressing tears when the coachman slows the horses. “What’s happening?” she says sharply. “We can’t be there yet already, surely?”

“I think we’re being robbed,” the coachman says, fumbling as he tries to pull out a pistol. He looks terrified. She can hear yelling from behind them too, now.

Milady rolls her eyes, pulling a pistol from beneath her seat with one hand and a sword with the other. The fancy dress also hides a knife or two. Any man who leans through the window demanding her money or her life will discover a third option very quickly. She’s in a melancholy mood right now, but she welcomes the shift to savagery instead.

After all, her new start isn’t until she actually _gets_ to England. And it would be foolish to travel without protection.

She stiffens as the source of the noise gets closer. That voice, it can’t be –

“Don’t shoot,” she says sharply to the coachman, just as Athos yells the same thing, drawing even with the carriage and yanking at his horse’s reins to slow it. The poor thing looks near exhaustion, sweat-streaked and red-eyed, and she wonders how long he’s been galloping for.

Athos peers through the window, nearly as wild-eyed as the horse. “Anne?” he says, and then his eyes focus on her for a moment and he closes them in relief, a long sigh escaping him. His whole body relaxes so much for a second she thinks he’ll fall off the horse. She gestures to the frightened coachman to stop.

“How many carriages of people have you scared half to death?” she enquires, keeping her tone mild. Inside, she’s a wreck, a toxic mixture of hope and fear and delight and anger.

“A few,” he admits. He pulls out a glove, looking at her with some sort of a plea. “You lost this.”

“Why are you here, Athos?” Milady ignores the glove and keeps her eyes on his face. She’s not a fool, and she’s been let down enough that she doesn’t leap to assume the best. She can see that his horse carries only him, no supplies of any kind. He’s always travelled light, but this is too light even for him: he’s not going with her to England. A proper farewell is something precious, of course, but she cannot forgive his lateness, any more than she can forgive the way her hopes took flight again for that one beautiful moment. A glove isn’t what she wants from him and neither is a farewell.

“You said – I would never see you again, if I didn’t reach the crossroads,” he says awkwardly. They have both slowed to a complete stop now, and she steps out of the carriage, gesturing for the coachman to keep them by the side of the road until she is ready to continue. Athos slides off his horse and passes it into the suspicious coachman’s hands as well, taking her arm gently to pull her aside into a private conversation.

“And you wished to make my last promise to you a lie?” She raises an eyebrow at him. “I suppose we should end as we began, with only lies between us.” 

“Not _only_ lies between us, you assured me,” he says, and kisses her so gently that it is a shadow of a kiss instead of a real one. There is an aching grief to the kiss, a feeling of loss and days gone by, and any last bit of hope that he plans to come with her evaporates.

She closes her eyes, lets the taste of him linger on her lips despite the sorrow in it, and then steps back to break away from him. “But the important parts were lies, weren’t they? I’m not just talking about my name or background. Faithfulness, in sickness and health, all the days of our lives, nothing shall ever come between us… such pretty words, but untrue. And then there were our later promises, that we would kill each other, that we were until death. I don’t think we have ever kept a single promise we made to each other. And now you come here to force me to break the only one left.”

“We could,” he says. “We could keep those earlier promises. Some of them, at least. The better ones.”

“You aren’t here to be with me,” she says baldly. “Are you?”

“I will go to England if that is what you want,” he says, but he winces and frowns as he says it, so she can’t feel happy at the statement, only suspicious. She waits, tilting her head, for an explanation. He gestures with his hands, tries to explain something, then cuts himself off and tries again. “After what I have done, I owe you that much.”

“You _owe_ me that much?” she repeats, shocked. The rage is sudden and overwhelming. Her hand flies out before she can stop it, the slap echoing like a gunshot, his head jerking to the side with the force of it. “You bastard, you think I want your guilt?”

“No, I simply meant – the way I treated you six years ago. I know what my brother did now, so I also know what I did. I need to make it right.”

She goes to slap him again, rage still unmanageable, but he catches her arm before she can. “I can’t be some kind of personification of your principles, Athos,” she says, voice shaking with rage. “I don’t exist to be a living demonstration of your chivalry, or your honour, or your duty, or your righteousness, or your remorse, or whatever else you come up with. All those years ago you made me an ideal instead of a woman in your mind, and then when that fell apart you turned me into some kind of demon. And now you look at me and see a way to assuage your own guilt? I’m not a concept, Athos, only a person. Let me be that.”

“I phrased that poorly,” he admits, clearing his throat.

“So phrase it better.”

“I want to be with you,” he says, just as baldly as her statement to the contrary. “So long as you do not ask me to leave, I will stay with you. My duty is in Paris, my life is in Paris, my brothers, and I would like to stay in Paris if I could, but as I said, I owe you – and I thought that if you want England, perhaps me giving up Paris and assenting to England could be a start on making reparation for what I have done. But wanting you has nothing to do with guilt or atonement.”

She exhales, and relaxes slightly, though she can still feel the heat in her cheeks from her sudden rage. “England as a form of martyrdom? I do hope you don’t tell the English your opinions of their country, or we will be chased out by mobs by the end of our first week there.”

“You don’t think I can be tactful?” One side of his mouth curves, just a little, in that expression of wry amusement that she loves.

“God in heaven,” she says, only half-kidding. “Forget a week, we will not last the day.”

“Perhaps it’s good my English is quite basic. If you only teach me compliments, I will have to speak nicely or not at all,” Athos says.

There’s a pause as they stare at each other, and then she says it baldly, because yes, now she’s all about telling painful truths. “It won’t ever be the same as it was. It can’t be. What we were… it’s broken. _We’re_ broken. What we are now…”

“I know,” he says. “Trying again will be difficult, even painful. But the only thing more painful than seeing you again, being tortured by your presence, was not seeing you at all. Being tortured by your absence. I want what you spoke of before, I want to be hopeful again, and I don’t – I don’t think that possibility exists for me without you.”

She nods, understanding him completely, the only one in the world who could understand him completely. Seeing him again, arguing with him, trying to kill him, fucking him, telling him the truth, all of it – it felt like her old wounds being flayed open viciously. But the truth is, they never healed, or if they did it wasn’t cleanly. There was poison sealed in there and she rotted from the inside out while they were apart. It has felt oddly freeing, reopening the wounds and letting all that bile bleed away. Maybe together they can figure out how to really heal. “You know me now. I won’t always be nice. I will be cruel, and impossible, and unfair, and angry at you. Often. I’m not made for sunshine and sweetness anymore.” 

“Neither am I,” he says, doing it again, just accepting her statement without question. One side of his lips curls up again into a sad almost-smile. “I don’t think either of us are who we were before, or that we could be happy with what we had back then. I don’t want you to be who you were. I don’t even know if either of us is capable of trusting anyone like we once did, not now, not after everything. But perhaps in time…”

“Yes,” she agrees. “Perhaps in time.” She shrugs. She lets her voice turn arch, trying to lighten the mood, which still feels strangely depressing for what should surely be a happy moment. “I’m sure we can find some way to keep ourselves occupied while we work on it.”

“Is that another promise?” He raises his eyebrow at her. He’s still not quite really smiling, though, and she can see a shadow on his face. And there was that grief in his kiss – she recognised the taste of it.

“There is something you are not telling me,” she says.

He hesitates, then says, “More than one thing. Treville made me captain,” he looks away, reaches up to lower his hat then realises it is not on his head and lets his hand drop. “And war will be declared with Spain.”

She blinks at him, shocked. War makes sense, Athos as captain makes sense, all that she can understand – but the third piece of the puzzle makes no sense, it does not fit. If that is the situation, why is he here? He did not choose her over his duty to the law or to Thomas, and she cannot imagine he would ever choose her over duty to his country and his Musketeer brothers either. Such a thing would tear him to pieces. No wonder he seems so odd, so unhappy, almost as if he is mourning.

“This is madness,” she says, suddenly convinced that it is in a way she hadn’t been even while warning him before. “You will abandon everything you believe in out of guilt? Or out of want, but still… Athos, your duty is everything to you, your commission is everything to you. And what will you tell your brothers? Sorry, you will have to fight this war without me, because I have run away with Milady de Winter, you remember Milady, surely, the woman who keeps trying to kill us, the whore, the thief, the liar, the assassin who had me shot last year, and also you must recall that time she -”

“I suppose I shall tell them that I love my wife, and could not lose her,” he says.

There is a long, long silence after he says it. There is birdsong and the huffing of the horses and her own breath, but she hears nothing but a singular steady beat marking the passing of seconds. She thinks she can hear his heartbeat instead of her own, or perhaps it is just that they are beating in time once more. She has accused him of loving her, even Catherine has accused him of loving her, but she never expected him to admit it. Hate is an easier word to spit than love.

“Well, then,” she says, clearing her throat as well. There is something blocking it, now, and she can feel tears gathering her eyes. “If that’s the case, I suppose we had best stay in Paris after all.” 

His face lightens, years dropping away so that he looks like the young Comte who ran through the fields with her, laughing. “We?”

“I would be a poor wife if I let my husband throw away his career just for the joys of English food,” Anne says. It is hard to say the next words she must say, harder than she would have believed possible. The last time she said them, after all, they were a plea for mercy that went answered. “And I love you as well.”

She hasn’t even finished the sentence before she’s in his arms, his mouth slanting down over hers like he’s trying to taste the words on her lips. She grips his shoulders to stay upright as he kisses her breath away with something close to desperation, as if this moment is something precious that could be yanked away from him without warning. Her heartbeat doubles at the first touch of his lips to hers, and she opens her mouth, pulling him closer, always closer, the passion that’s always right at the surface around him beginning to rise up and overtake her, fire spreading across her skin, his hands messing up her meticulously done hair, and she closes her eyes and thinks _YES_ with every fibre of her body in agreement.

She’s on the verge of yanking him into the carriage or pushing him up against a tree, damn the coachman, when a rider nearly runs them down, cursing at them. Athos pulls her out of the way quickly, releasing her mouth to do it, and they stare at each other from only a few inches away with something like amazement. She can breathe again, but her breaths are broken and needy, and she’d much rather he stole them once more.

“Do you…” she starts to say, once she’s managed to regain control of herself – to an extent, anyway. “Should I move into an inn? Or find lodgings? Or…”

“No. When have we ever done things by halves?” He looks quite winded himself, dazed and uncharacteristically happy. His hand comes up to stroke down her cheek. “If we travelled together, we should have shared a room wherever we went, wouldn’t we? So live with me. Try again.”

She can feel nerves squirming in her stomach, because living with someone else requires trust that staying at an inn with them does not, for all he equated the two. The last time she based her life around him, placed everything she had and was in his care, she also lost everything when it fell apart. This time, she will need precautions, just for her own peace of mind – somewhere else to stay just in case, an income not dependent on him, items and funds stashed elsewhere. Even if she manages all that, though, the risk still chills her slightly. Still, she puts those thoughts away as something to deal with later, and for now, simply nods, accepting. He loves her. For that, she’s willing to take almost any risk, for all that it terrifies her to think it.

“I do hope that a Musketeer captain gets nice rooms.” She’s trying to sound light, but she can hear the huskiness to her voice. He’s standing so close to her, and all she wants to do is kiss him again, and now it’s allowed – to kiss him in the open, to kiss him with love and tenderness as well as want. “I do not expect anything like La Fere, you understand, but your current bed at the Garrison is far too small to share.”

“I don’t recall any complaints last time,” he teases, still visibly stunned by his good fortune. He presses his lips to hers for another brief, beautiful moment.

“My mouth was otherwise occupied,” she quips after he pulls back. She feels strange and shaky and warm, and it takes her a moment to recognise the feeling that comes over her: happiness, in spite of her fear. She turns to the coachman, who has been trying very hard not to eavesdrop on their intense conversation since the slapping, and who only looks more fascinated since the kiss. She straightens slightly and pulls back on her air of effortless dignity and command. “I’m going to ride with my husband. You, head back to Paris. Take my things to the Musketeers Garrison, ask for d’Artagnan, and tell him to store them in the new captain’s room.”

Athos coughs. “D’Artagnan just got married, he won’t be there.”

“Oh, right. Ask for Aramis -”

“Headed for a monastery,” he says sotto voce.

“A what now? My God, he’ll go mad in a week.” She dismisses this revelation as largely unimportant to her, although she guesses her husband will probably be riding off shortly to retrieve the man. “Why are none of your friends around when they can finally be useful? Just choose some random Musketeer from the crowd, then.”

Athos waits until the coachman gives her a confused nod before asking in an undertone, “Why not Porthos?”

“I don’t feel his reaction would be quite amusing enough to justify having my dresses thrown in the mud,” she says. “Whereas with the other two it would be worth every livre I had to spend on cleaning, even if I couldn’t see their expressions myself.” 

To her absolute astonishment, he laughs. Not a brief, sour chuckle, or a huff of amusement, or a drunken, slightly manic cackle, or even the half-laugh he sometimes cuts off as if he can’t stand to finish it, but a genuine, amused peal of laughter. She doesn’t know if he laughs like that with his friends still, but she hasn’t heard it in years. It’s a little rusty from disuse, but it happens. Her husband’s real laughter, something she thought had probably died long ago, buried on the grounds of his estate and only existing in her distant memories. But then, she thought the same thing about her marriage and even her own heart, and it looks like they have come back to life as well. As he told her once, they are prone to resurrection. 

What can she do in Paris? Who will she be? She’d never thought she could make a new start for herself in Paris, not with her history there, and she feels a twinge of worry that maybe she still can’t – but Athos will be there, and that is reason enough to try, surely. However, while she doesn’t want to fall back into who she was, she still needs money of her own, options, choices. She won’t live on Athos’s munificence again, wife or no. Maybe for a while she can assist the Inseparables on missions, or at least by gathering information for them, because as far as she can see their skills at deception and deduction are sorely lacking. But soon, the war will come, and they will head to the front, and it will just be her, alone, in Paris, waiting for her husband. She cannot imagine herself like that, a woman who waits.

But then, it is Paris, there is always something going on: perhaps Treville will have work for her. Perhaps some other player in the game will. Perhaps she can find a way closer to the front. Perhaps she can stockpile intelligence and relay it to Athos whenever he returns, or give it to Treville, or even sell it to highest bidder, provided it is not something that could endanger her husband. She is resourceful and skilful and intelligent, second to none in the games of intrigue and intelligence, and she _will_ find something to do that is not outright assassination. Though it still may involve the kinds of violence or duplicity that her husband will not approve of, another conversation they will have to have – another impossible negotiation to fight through as part of trying to steer blindly towards a future where they can function together. It should exhaust her to think of all the steps, all the difficulties, but right now instead she exults at the challenge. 

However these conversations go, and whatever she ends up doing, when he returns from the war – she thinks _when_ , not _if_ , because she refuses to believe he will not return – she will be there.

“Where did you go?” he wants to know. He is the only man who has ever really noticed when she slides into introspection. Other men have always just assumed they are the centre of her attention, all evidence to the contrary ignored.

“What’s important is I returned,” she says. “Now help me up onto that horse, Athos. It’s already getting quite late and I have plans for tonight.” 

As it happens, they barely make it twenty minutes before he pulls the horse off the road. She has been mouthing at his neck for some time, deliberately pressed up against his back with her arms around his waist, and she’s amazed at his self-control. “Next to a road, really?” he asks incredulously, and inhales shakily as she bites his earlobe, tightening her grip.

“In a meadow,” she corrects happily, rubbing against his back so that he can feel her breasts even through the corset. She moves one her hands down from its position gripping his waist to caress him through his trousers, savouring his low groan.

He drags her down off the horse and into the grass before she can blink, but she tugs away, laughing, and manages to get almost twenty feet before he brings her down in a heap of expensive skirts and tousled hair. They roll across the ground and then he is moving down her body, tugging up the skirt and diving in with single-minded focus, and her eyes slam shut with pleasure as his mouth finds her. He tastes and licks with deliberate slow intensity until she is half-mad with need.

It is not like it was in Pinon. They are lit by a silvery moon instead of glowing in the sunlight, for one thing. It’s later and darker and colder, and she thinks that this is somehow right, like the world is reflecting the changes in them. It doesn’t make it any less beautiful, and it doesn’t change the way her body surges as he rasps his tongue against her clit. She arches against him, mindless and wanting, exulting in the feel of him.

He’s amazing at this, he always was. His mouth can always send her reeling. He licks at her until her hands are twisting painfully tight in his hair, until her back is so sharply curved in her efforts to press herself against his mouth that she’s not even sure if she’s touching the ground, until the heat in her becomes a raging inferno and she’s consumed by it. He probes inside her with a finger until he finds a spot that makes her body leap, then curves his finger just right, and continues to rub it against the spot that drives her fucking crazy, not leaving it alone, not letting her regain her equilibrium for a moment. She thinks wildly that she can feel his smug smile against her cunt as she jerks against him uncontrollably, giving in and letting out a series of little, breathless cries.

When she comes he deliberately prolongs it, licking at her and touching at her so that she can’t stop grinding up into his face, her body pushing restlessly against his tongue and fingers, her mind utterly gone.

“Again?” he asks teasingly against her, far too pleased with himself.

“Again,” she begs, half-sobbing the word as she starts to come down, “Again, again -”

And he obliges, licking into her again and again, touching her over and over, until the pleasure starts to have a raw edge, until she’s so oversensitive that each lick feels like a brand, and she can’t stand the idea of stopping but her body is going to shake into pieces if she doesn’t, and besides, he’s been waiting for his own pleasure long enough. She’s sobbing in earnest by then, her breathing so shaky there’s no pattern to it at all, past caring about anything other than the feeling of him against her.

“Anne?” he asks, voice half a growl, and she knows what he’s asking and yanks blindly at him to move up her body already.

When he rocks into her she wraps herself around him, wanting the weight of him on top of her. For years she’s stayed light, ready to flee, but right now she’s afraid of her body flying away from pure pleasure so there’s something comforting about the solidness pressing her down against the earth. He kisses her as he pushes inside and she can taste herself on his lips, the salty-sweetness of her body, and she groans against it as he anchors himself deep inside her and makes a home there yet again. When he comes, he presses his lips to her neck and rides it out, sweaty and mussed and wrecked with pleasure, unimaginably beautiful in his love and need and eventual surrender. She tries to fix every moment in her memory, tries to hold onto it, but as always his pleasure triggers something in her and she is wrecked as well, sobbing and shaking against him, wrapped around him so tightly she has no idea where he ends and she begins.

“I think my dress may be beyond saving,” she says eventually, voice a rasp.

“I think my mind may be.”

“I’ve known that for years,” she drawls. “The dress is a bit more valuable, to be honest. I sent the rest back to the Garrison. What on earth will I wear now?”

“I suppose you’ll have to go naked,” he says into her throat, and presses another kiss to it.

“It’s a thought.”

“Well, I now have a motive to destroy as many of your dresses as possible,” he says.

Athos, teasing her in a way that isn’t snide or cruel – that’s as much of a miracle as his laugh, she thinks. She blinks her wet eyes open slowly, keeping them half-lidded, the world blurred by the tears of happiness she can’t stem, and she smiles up at the stars with a joy too young and artless for Milady de Winter.

There are a thousand things unsaid, and a hundred arguments that they have yet to have, many quite difficult and raw. It will take time to adjust to who they are now, to admit truths and share stories, to really find each other again, and doing that will feel like splitting her soul open for his perusal. When they get back no one will approve of the woman Athos has chosen, she’ll face scorn and distrust from his friends, the shadowy underworld of Paris may well try to pull her back in, and he’ll be stolen from her again by war for an unknown amount of time. There are so many things to worry about it she shouldn’t be able to smile so freely. But for now she is wound around her husband, and in a minute she will ride back to Paris seated behind her husband, and tonight she will share a bed with her husband. Life is full of surprises, even when you are the cynical and cold Milady de Winter, and that is something worth smiling about.

“Athos?”

“Yes?”

“Take me home, please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm considering writing a couple more chapters after this, which would also be extremely non-canonical. I just kind of like the idea of some snapshots of them working through their dysfunction and trying to figure things out. Thoughts?


	9. Growing Pains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently I'm incapable of letting anything end. If I do keep updating this it probably won't be regularly, though.

“What the hell was that?” Milady says, fury dripping off every syllable, the second the door to his office slams shut behind them. 

“Surely if anyone has the right to ask -” Athos begins, infuriated.

“Shut up! Another ten minutes and I’d have had his information.” For once, she’s not speaking in an undertone, apparently not caring if every other Musketeer can hear them. Porthos and d’Artagnan are away on a mission without him – leaving him feeling left out and separate from his friends, which isn’t doing his temper any favours – but he doesn’t particularly want his other subordinates to hear this either.

“Another ten minutes and you’d have had him, full stop,” Athos growls. A nice night sharing a drink in a tavern with his wife, he’d thought. Well, that’d teach him.

There’s a momentary pause where she stares at him, stunned, and then her anger seems to double. “ _That’s_ what this… this _tantrum_ was about? Dragging me out of there as if I was – as if I was -”

“My wife?” he finishes, sardonic.

“No, no more of this absurd possessiveness. You’ve lost that right,” she flashes, raising her fan and smacking it against his arm. The gesture somehow manages to be petty, cranky, and genuinely threatening all at the same time. Probably it’s the look in her eyes, which is pure fire. “You’ve lost _most_ rights, as of now.”

“Oh, I apologise for offending your new swain. Should I have politely let him know exactly how you like to be fucked? I’d hate for you to have a dull night. How dare I remind you that you’re supposed to be mine!”

“I can make my own nights interesting,” she says, voice low and dangerous. “And I don’t belong to anyone but myself.”

“That’s news to me, _wife_.”

“Oh, is every moment of my time yours? Does every choice I make depend on your opinion?” she spits, leaning into him unconsciously. “Do I only have your love when I bend entirely to your will, Athos?”

At that, he slumps slightly, ashamed, before rallying. “Of course not. But you cannot expect me to sit idly by while you act the -” He cuts himself off before he can escalate this too far, but she’s already caught his meaning.

“While I act the _what_ , Athos?” Her voice is cool and flat now, every emotion excised. “No, finish your statement. I’m interested. I love hearing how my husband is ashamed of me. Is this why your friends haven’t been informed of my return yet? The Inseparables share everything except, apparently, the information that one of them has recommitted to marriage with a whore. After all, that would be shaming, wouldn’t it? Better to keep them in ignorance.”

“My friends have nothing to do with this,” he says, only barely holding himself back from pointing out that after some of the things she’s pulled over the last couple of years, his friends have far worse to hold against her than her bedroom activities. That one of them spent a while intimately aware of those activities is something he tries not to dwell on, because if he does, he thinks his rage will double, and that’s hardly fair.

She’s right that he probably should have told Porthos and d’Artagnan she’d come back to the city, but first they were riding to see if Aramis would come back with them, and since then his time has been taken up by frantic work during the days and desperate lust during the nights, so he hasn’t exactly had time. Or made time. He’s not sure which. “I’m not ashamed of you.”

“So tell them, then. And while you’re at it, if you’re not ashamed of me, then let me _be_ me, Athos.”

“How am I supposed to accept you being you, if it means you being with anyone beside me?” he says, and now all the anger is gone from his voice, leaving pure misery, which is much more humiliating. He clears his throat and tries a different tack, “Besides, it is you who insists on staying elsewhere. If you lived with me properly Porthos and d’Artagnan would have realised you were here as soon as we returned from Douai, but you spend only an hour or two here at a time. All your things are here, I’m here, and you sleep here almost every night… but you behave as if you live at the inn instead, sneaking in to join me and creeping out in the morning. I’m not the one who’s ashamed. Captain of the Musketeers is a step downwards from a Comte, isn’t it?”

Her voice softens, but it’s so slight as to be almost imperceptible, so her next comment still sounds like a reprimand. “The only step down is going from a man who worshipped me to one who seemingly cannot bring himself to trust me at all.”

The words leave him breathless, but he gathers himself somehow. “I’m working on that. Just as you are.” They both have more than enough reasons to distrust each other, after all. But he thinks sometimes she misunderstands the look on his face when he stares at her – she sees his fear and reads it as distrust, when really, it’s fear at having something to lose. After all this time, he has her back with him, but he won’t survive it if he loses her again, whether it’s to another man, England, or her old life.

“I know you are,” she says, and now the softening is much more noticeable, her dignity fading to misery as well, and it wrecks him. “But… you wished to be back in Paris, so I came, and now this is all I have that’s left of who I was, do you understand? The work I can get, that is all I have besides you. You can’t ask me to give that up as well. You gave up nothing for this. I know you were willing to, I _know_ you were, but you didn’t have to, and I did. You won’t even give up your pride by telling your friends about me.”

“If I have kept you from my friends, it is only that -” he pauses, trying to find the right words.

“You’re scared of what they will say,” she says, unerringly accurate as always. “You think we’re something breakable, and you’re scared they’ll break it. Just like you were scared that I would break us tonight, that I’d go too far, that I’d cross a line in some way and ruin this again.”

“I can’t be shattered again,” he says through numb lips, and regrets saying it a moment later.

Her fury roars back unexpectedly. “And I _can_? I was _hanged_ , Athos. _You_ hanged me. I’ll have these scars forever. Every time I look in a mirror I’m reminded where loving you takes me.” Her voice is ice cold, despite the fire in her eyes. “But I’m still here. And if you think what we have is so fragile that it can be shattered by a rude comment from a friend, or a meaningless flirtation conducted for intelligence, I honestly don’t know _why_. If what we have is so easily broken, is any of it worth it?”

“Yes,” he says, wrecked by her words, but more than that, by the look in her eyes. “It is.” It’s two steps to reach her, cup her face in his hands, and kiss her with every bit of emotion in him. This is difficult, yes. Sometimes it seems impossible. But he never doubts that it’s worth it. Sometimes even hopes that are apparently futile can be worth giving everything for. It would be far worse to have nothing to hope for. He lived five years of that.

When his mouth is on hers, he has no doubts at all. They fight for control of the kiss, but as always the fight turns into a different kind of fight in moments – they’re both fighting to get closer, to have the other, to hold the other. They’re both fighting to make this right. Sometimes it seems like they’re afraid of each other, but their true fear is themselves – they know how to break things, not make them. Not build them. They’ve left the sunlit fantasy of the Comte and the Comtesse behind, and now they have to be Athos and Milady instead, and Athos and Milady are scarred, damaged creatures, hiding scared in corners and snarling at each other because they don’t know how else to deal with this new and strange reality. A kiss is an animal thing, though. Need and want without all those complications. A kiss is easy.

When he pulls back, she tries to follow his lips, to keep them connected, and it’s a strain not to give in. But they need to deal with this, not just fuck the issue into submission like always, so he straightens so she can’t quite press her lips to his, despite what they both desperately want. “I will tell them,” he says to her, still pressed so close that their hearts beat as one. “I’m just waiting for the right moment. We’ve all been so busy of late.”

She tries to slow her breathing, dropping her head so that her forehead is against his shoulder, controlling herself slowly. She recognises what he said for the peace offering it is, and gives one of her own. “And I will move into here properly. I just – I only -” It seems that neither of them can manage sentences right now. Taunts are easy. Changing is hard, growing is hard. “If I stay here every night, there is nowhere to go if you’re angry, or frustrated, or if you get sick of me. Or vice versa.”

“What a thought,” he says, trying for gentle humour. It’s not a talent of his. “I would like to learn what it feels like to get sick of you. I tried for over half a decade and never managed it, so it’s a delight to imagine that your dresses taking over the room could finally drive me to give up on you entirely.”

She gives a short laugh. “You know what I mean. We’re both – explosive. Unsafe. Together -”

“I know,” he says. He does. Only a week ago, he woke in a blurry panic when she slid into his bed, wondering if a knife would be slid between his ribs. The first time he touched her arm to get her attention she tensed, automatically ready to pull a weapon on him. They are already starting to readjust, though – now, they pause and stop themselves before they go to flee or fight the other. Tomorrow, what will they do instead? Change _is_ hard. So is rebuilding the trust they both betrayed so thoroughly. But it’s possible. He believes that. He has to believe that. “But I love you, and you love me, and perhaps that isn’t everything, but I think it’s enough for us to keep trying.”

She studies him. He looks back at her, pleading. He couldn’t stand it if she left, if she tried to go to England again. He needs her here. But perhaps that’s not enough: he also _wants_ her here. More than he wants anything in this world, or the next.

“I was only flirting with him for the information,” she says finally, grudgingly. “You know that, surely. I wouldn’t have allowed it to go further.”

“But bodies mean little to you,” he says. The words could be hard, but the plaintive note to them robs them of all offensiveness.

“But they mean something to you,” she says, “Or at least, mine does. That matters to me. You don’t get to dictate what I do, but that doesn’t mean I don’t consider your feelings before I do it. I just didn’t realise you would react so strongly to something so…” she shrugs her shoulders, then echoes his dismissive description of English food, “Pffff.”

“And I didn’t realise you wished me to tell Porthos and d’Artagnan of your presence,” he says honestly. “I was just enjoying keeping the rest of the world away from this one part of it for a while.”

It will be awkward telling them, he imagines, and it will probably lead to quite a few remarks that might offend or hurt Anne (assuming she cares what they think, which is by no means certain), not mention test his own temper. Worse, d’Artagnan will probably see it as a kind of betrayal, after everything Milady de Winter has done to him and to Constance. Allowing her to remain in Paris would probably have seemed insult enough, and Athos has done far more than that – he’s the entire reason she’s still here, he’s trying to move her permanently into the Garrison they all live at, he’s forgiven her and is trying to earn her forgiveness in return. Oh, both of them knew he still had feelings for her, that was hard to hide, and Porthos at least seemed to understand those feelings to an extent. But harbouring confused emotions about the wife he tried to execute is very different than trying to build a life with the woman who’s attempted to murder them all.

“Me too,” she admits. “That’s why I’ve been doing next to nothing, because I know how you feel about my work, about any of my work. But then when I heard that man hint at information… I need to _do_ things, Athos, things that earn money, preferably. I’ve never been good at idleness. At Pinon there was the house to run, but you hardly need to me to help run the Garrison – although it would certainly be amusing to see the reactions if I tried. Gathering intelligence is perhaps the only lawful, non-murderous career I could excel at. So when I saw he had some, I couldn’t give up the opportunity to get it. I need to use my skills or I’ll go mad.”

“Your skills…” he started to say, but then cuts himself off, because he’s not sure how he wants to continue the sentence but he is very sure it won’t end well for him.

To his surprise, she smirks, and a gleam comes into her eyes. “I promise that one set of skills is reserved purely for you,” she says, tapping him lightly on the shoulder with the fan she still has clutched in one hand, “And in deference to your morals and my own attempts to change, there’s another set I’m trying to retire entirely. But gathering information doesn’t always need to be bloody, and I’m _very_ good at it.”

He admits to himself he overreacted. Partly jealousy, of course – well, mainly jealousy. But he’d also experienced a moment of fear to see her manipulating the man like that, as if he was seeing the Milady de Winter of a year ago all over again, the woman who he’d tried so hard to believe was nothing but false emotions layered over cold, cruel emptiness. He’s terrified of the choices he might have to make if she backslides into hiring out her soul to men like Richelieu again, and terrified because if she does so he’ll know it’s his fault for having gone after her and somehow persuaded her to return to Paris and her past.

But if she can do this without killing… well. He doesn’t like underhanded work, but he’s no fool, and he knows how useful it is. There’s plenty of scurrilous information she can buy and sell that has nothing to do with them or the war, but if she does find out titbits relating to current events, he’s sure Treville can make use of them. And it can hardly harm the Captain of the Musketeers if he ends up with a spymistress for a wife, even if he finds it uncomfortable for his own morals.

“I’m sorry for losing my temper and dragging you away,” he says. He’s always found it easy to feel guilty about what he’s done. Now he’s learning to apologise instead, to try to move past it. It’s hard to explain the difference, exactly, but he feels it in his bones: his guilt was ultimately a selfish thing, a way to dwell on the past to the exclusion of everything else, to mope, to indulge in the self-centred belief that everything that happened was due to him but simultaneously the fatalistic view that none of it could be fixed anymore. Now, he needs to learn to take a different kind of responsibility, just as she does – they must learn to face the past and learn from it instead of drowning in it. Must try to build a future.

A pause while she considers his apology, and then that slow, teasing smile comes across her face, and he knows he’s forgiven, but also that the time for serious discussion is over. “I could make you _much_ sorrier,” she purrs, and the sound of her voice is a caress and a tease at once.

“I’m sure you could,” he says, licking suddenly-dry lips. “Is that a threat or an offer?”

“You’ve always been so very clever, Athos. I’ll leave you to figure that one out on your own.” She walks backwards to the desk and boosts herself onto it, leaning backwards to rest her weight on her hands. She lets the fan clatter to the floor as she stretches languorously. The sinuous movement makes her bodice dip lower, her breasts threatening to pop out as she inhales deeply, staring at the ceiling and then letting her eyes slide half-closed as if in imagined pleasure. She lets her legs fall to each side so that there’s a space to step into.

Athos can recognise a trap when he sees it, but this trap seems like one worth falling into, so he moves forward quickly to stand between her legs and press her against the desk, already itching to reach below her skirts, to touch her. He is almost sure that she is already wet, because even if their argument was painful and serious, it was still an argument and those only lead in one direction for them.

“Oh, no, no,” she says, straightening again, a wicked gleam in her eyes as he takes the bait. She shoves him back a step with one hand, then raises a leg and plants her booted foot squarely on his chest, using that to forcefully push him back a couple more stumbling steps. He can see up her skirts as she does and the thought of sliding his hands up her legs and taking her skirts and petticoats with them makes him dizzy. He could be inside her in moments. “I don’t remember giving you permission to do that.”

“Then what _do_ I have permission to do, Milady?” he says, reaching up to stroke a hand along the leg braced against him. For once, she’s wearing stockings, and he feels a brief pang of wistfulness for the woman who went barefoot all around Pinon and La Fere.

“You may unlace my boot, to start with,” she orders.

“The door isn’t locked,” he warns her.

“Then I suggest you don’t make too much noise,” Milady says haughtily, as if she’s not the one who once screamed so loudly that two panicked footmen broke into their room, thinking she was being murdered. Now there’s a memory with a sting to it that wasn’t there originally – but as soon as _that_ particular darkness jumps to his mind, he forces it away. He may never stop regretting his actions or loathing himself for them, but there is a time and a place for dwelling on it, and when his wife has that glitter to her eyes and flush to her face it’s the time and place for very different things.

He fumbles with the laces of the boot pressed against his chest, then when he manages to get it undone he has to step back to pull it off. She allows it, dropping her leg back to its former position, but when he moves in close again she raises her other foot to exactly the same spot. This time, her push is less gentle than before, twisting her foot so that the toe of her boot grinds into him.

“Good,” she purrs. “The other as well. And don’t move without my order.”

He works at the laces with his fingers, caught on a knot, and she leans back to balance herself and continues to push her stockinged foot into him, kneading it against him like a clawing cat. Then she slides her foot up his inner thigh and then hooks it under his cock, pulling upwards just a little, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to feel the pressure of it. He jerks against her, and has to force himself to concentrate on undoing the boot from the other foot.

“I wonder if I could make you come just like this,” she muses, still rubbing her foot lightly against his cock, giving friction but no real touch. 

“Probably,” he says, mouth dry. “Please don’t.” He lets the other boot drop to the floor.

She smiles at him smugly, like the cat who got the cream, ate the canary, and definitely got his tongue, all at once. “Oh, I would. But you were so _emphatic_ about how you didn’t want me to use my skills. I’d hate to horrify you.”

“You could never.”

“My stockings, if you please,” she says lazily. “Slowly.”

Athos obeys the command, reaching up to the very top of her legs, close enough to her cunt to feel the heat and wetness of her. He thinks he can smell it as well. He strokes his way down her legs as he removes the stockings, slowly, one after the other, hyper-aware of the silky slide of them against her even-silkier skin. He holds her ankle after he finishes the second one, deliberately caressing the arch of her foot and then slowly moving back up her leg. He can see her pupils dilate as he does so, black expanding until the iris is just a thin line of green.

“ _Very_ good,” she says approvingly, pulling her legs away from his wandering hands to hang down against the desk again, and she leans forward to raise her skirts up. The lush curves of her breasts roll forward with her, threatening to escape the boning of her corset again, and he wants to move closer and help them to freedom but she hasn’t given him permission to yet so he swallows the desire. Once she’s raised her dress so that the skirts are a sea of folds and billows rucked up just above her hips, she lets her now-bare legs spread again so that he can see her entirely. He groans.

“You’re so wet,” he murmurs without meaning to. It’s so visible, her need. She glistens with it.

“Well, when we argue,” she says, shrugging one shoulder so her chest moves interestingly again, as if that explains everything – which really, it does. He decides that he loves the low top of this dress and she should never wear another. Or perhaps that she should simply never wear anything at all. Around him, anyway. A loose dark ringlet curls down her pale neck and across one creamy breast like it’s mapping a trail, and he desperately wants to follow it with his mouth.

“May I –” he begins.

“No,” she says simply, and he groans again. “I don’t think you’re anywhere _near_ sorry enough. What is it you said to me some time ago? It takes a while for the lesson to stick?”

“It’s sticking, trust me,” he growls. He’s already painfully hard and she hasn’t done a thing yet besides get him to remove her shoes and stockings and let him see her cunt. He gets to see her naked every day now – how is it she can still affect him so effortlessly?

“Hmm, perhaps I should take mercy on you then,” she says. She moves one gloved hand to her cunt and lightly circles close to the spot that he knows drives her mad, contemplating him through those half-closed eyes. “No, I think not. I think you have to earn it first.” She closes her eyes fully and rubs two fingers against her clit, letting out a low moan as she does so. “You lost your temper so quickly, after all. I think you need to work on your restraint.”

He watches, hypnotised and desperate, ad she continues to alternate between circling her clit and rubbing in sharp little up and down movements. She keeps her touch very light, not letting herself go anywhere near orgasm, but making sure he can see every little motion. At one point she pushes two fingers inside herself with a little intake of breath and scissors them, pulling herself wide so he can just about see inside her, and he goes a little faint with how desperately he wants to replace her fingers with his own, or with his tongue, or with his cock.

“What would you like me to do?” she asks after a while of driving him mad with wet little movements of her fingers against herself, each little twitch starkly visible and torturously beautiful. Her breathing is coming quite a bit faster now, her breasts visibly heaving in her corsets, and the flush across her cheeks is hectic and needy. “You’re being such an attentive audience, I’d hate to bore you. More fingers? Faster? What would you like?”

He growls under his breath. “Your breasts,” he says hoarsely. “Touch your breasts.”

“Mm, that sounds like a good idea.” She yanks apart her corset just enough to arch her back and thrust her breasts into her hands, enjoying the fullness of them the way he does, squeezing them lightly. She returns one hand to between her legs, but continues to play with her breast with the other, holding it up like an offering. “Should I pinch my nipples? Oh, I can see you’re a fan of that idea.” She casually sucks at the index finger and thumb of her free hand, wetting the glove, and then pinches at a nipple with it. “Oh, the wetness is nice.” She moves her head slightly to blow at it and her nipple puckers further. Then she moves to the other. “ _Very_ nice. Shall I tell you what I’m thinking of while I do this?”

He wants to be inside her so desperately he’s trembling and sweating with it, but he knows that waiting will only make it more amazing when she finally does take pity on him and let him thrust home. There’s a part of him that loves it when she controls him and orders him about, and there’s another, darker part of him that enjoys taking back the power as well. He thinks she’s the same, and that’s why they have both always loved the fight as much as the capitulation. He manages a nod.

“I do love the feeling of your beard against my thighs when you push your tongue inside me,” she says, pushing a hard finger back inside herself and suppressing a gasp. With the other hand she continues to tease at her breasts. He can tell from the quaver to her voice that it’s hard for her to monologue while she does this – once she starts touching herself more firmly, she’ll probably lose any ability to form words. “It’s like nothing else. You lick into me like my cunt is the greatest thing you’ve ever tasted. You positively devour it. It’s quite something. I suppose if I gave you permission, you’d be doing that right now, wouldn’t you? Well, maybe later. I love the sight of you on your knees for me.”

He’s spoilt for choice when it comes to where to put his eyes – the long, smooth legs, the trembling muscles in her thighs, the wet clench of her around her white-gloved fingers surrounded by damp curls, the swollen, heavy breasts she’s stroking and pinching at, her expression of amusement steadily being overtaken but lust and neediness.

“Any time you like,” he says, half-choking on desire. He’s starting to wonder if she does intend to leave him achingly hard and unsatisfied. That would certainly make him sorrier than before, but surely even Milady de Winter could not be so cruel. Luckily, she answers the question moments later.

“You can get your cock out, if you like,” she says graciously, her voice barely stuttering but her eyes beginning to look wild. He can see she’s having trouble keeping her fingers at their former slow pace. “Touch yourself. It looks like you need it, after all.”

He moves almost embarrassingly fast, fumbling to open his pants, to reach for himself. He’s already groaning at the idea of release.

“But be warned,” she says, leaning precariously off the desk to place two wet gloved fingers against his mouth to pause him. “If you come before I give you permission to take me, that’ll be the _only_ pleasure you get tonight. So I suggest you take it _slow_.”

He can taste and smell the arousal soaked into the silky material of the glove, and almost against his will, he opens his mouth to press his tongue against her fingers before she removes them. It makes his cock jump and he drops his hand to the base, aware he’s already dangerously close to coming from the lightest squeeze, just as aware that he doesn’t want to spend into his hand when he could have all that tight wet warmth enveloping him.

“No comment on that, Athos? Nothing you wish to say?” She tuts. “You used to be so talkative in bed, but now I feel like I’m the one carrying the conversation.” 

She circles her clit again very lightly, smirking at him, and he can’t stop his hand from stroking along the length of his cock, hissing at the feeling of it. It’s impossible not to touch himself, with her looking at him like that, with the way she’s moving against her own hands.

He needs to be inside her. Needs it. So he needs her to give in quickly. Luckily, he’s got some experience in this area. And she just told him to use his words.

“I don’t think you’ll keep to that threat,” he says, letting his voice go low and a little dangerous, the way he knows she likes it. He manages to keep his own hand light, not fisting around himself, not touching his balls or the head of his cock, just moving up and down in smooth, easy strokes. “In fact, I’m sure you won’t.”

“No?” she manages, but he can see her fingers quicken momentarily, the stutter of her breath at his tone. She told him once that his low tone always felt like a stroke against her skin. Her voice is like a touch to him as well: it used to be always a caress, but now she uses it to slap him as much as to stroke him, and he finds he enjoys the contrast. “Try me.”

“Maybe I will,” he says, and now he just sounds hoarse. He tries to give her a mocking smile, but he’s so close to the edge he’s sure it comes out manic instead. “We can see how well you practice restraint when I’ve got you pinned against something, biting into your neck, my hand working you, fingers twisting and thrusting up inside of you. You can’t get quite the same angle yourself, can you? There’s that spot inside you – you know the one – and if I stroke it once, maybe twice, I think you’ll _beg_ to give me pleasure.”

The hand she’s not using to pleasure herself drops back to the desk, and he can see it whiten around the wood as she rubs the other one harder against herself. “I don’t – I don’t beg easily,” she says, a little brokenly, a lie she’s told him often. Her eyes have dropped from his face to his cock, and she wets her lips with her tongue as she watches him, her fingers moving more roughly, her rhythm becoming more desperate.

“That hasn’t been my experience,” he manages, but the memories that brings up make his hand clench harder around the base of his cock and he nearly thrusts against it. He has to force himself to relax. He’s so aroused it’s painful, and she’s right there, and she’s so wet, and his gaze is all but nailed to those white gloved fingers exploring her depths, the way she curves them into herself.

She’s incapable of answering now, except with a moan, rocking against her own hand. Her frantic movements are making the desk shake.

“I love watching you beg,” he says roughly, to urge her on. He’s too close, now, and his own eyes slide half-closed with need. “On your knees or not. I love _making_ you beg. God, the way you moan when you give in… I could come just from the fucking noise, I swear.”

She lets out a noise like a sob, now, eyes fixed on him touching himself, three fingers inside herself. Her whole hand is soaked. “ _Athos_ ,” she gasps out, and her eyes slide shut, and then she’s moving uncontrollably against her hand, chasing the edge, whole body trembling with desperation.

“May I -” he chokes out again, and this time her answer’s different.

“Yes, _yes_ ,” she sobs shakily, breath coming in pants now.

She somehow manages to pull her fingers out and move them to her clit again instead, letting out a keening, needy noise at the feeling of emptiness, and when he moves forward to grab her hips and slams his cock inside her without hesitation she gives a little moan of relief at being filled again, her fingers speeding up again on her clit. “Oh, God,” he says. The slick tightness of her cunt envelops his cock and it feels like any blood that was left in his brain plummets south immediately. God, she feels so _good_ , and he’s so _close_ , and he can already feel the tremors of her body squeezing around him.

She leaves off her white-knuckled grip on the edge of the table to curl her fingers into his back, fingernails biting in, opening herself up to him more, legs locked around him in a vice grip. She’s still rocking, unceasingly, desperately; and he finds that he can’t control his own movement anymore either. He hammers himself inside her, thrusting hard and deep, thinking of nothing but the heat and the feel of her. The desk squeaks against the ground as he pounds into her, and she cries out, spasming around him.

He holds on for a few moments, fighting uselessly against the tide, and then she bites hard into the place where his neck meets his shoulder and rolls her hips against him with helpless desire and he loses any semblance of control, slamming into her, chasing his own pleasure. When it overwhelms him and he spills inside her, he gives her matching bite marks on her own neck, just below where her choker is, and she whimpers at the pain and pleasure of it, the two of them locked around each other, both moving and moving and _moving_ , unable to stop, desperately trying prolong their bliss, little bursts of pleasure rocking them and ruining them over and over again. Eventually he stills, feeling her whimpers begin to take on an oversensitive edge, his own cock thoroughly emptied and softening inside her. 

“I hope the paperwork I’m sitting on wasn’t important,” she says eventually, breathless. She extracts her hand from between them, where it was pressed to her clit, and leans back on it as well as the other. “Because I rather think it’s ruined.”

He loosens his hands from her hips, moving them up to her back to press her into a soft, lingering kiss. She opens her mouth under his, lazy and satiated. “I don’t care if it was a fucking peace treaty with Spain, it was worth it.”

“It better be,” she says against his lips, and he remembers her asking before if what they had was really worth it, if he seemed to think it so fragile his friends could break it. He makes a silent decision to speak to the others tomorrow – no, not tomorrow, they’re on a mission, he remembers suddenly, a little embarrassed he’d so thoroughly forgotten that. Well, when they return, he will tell them everything, and face whatever complaints and criticisms they wish to share on his own without exposing her to it.

“It’s always worth it,” he promises, meaning it absolutely.


	10. Cards on the Table

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the last chapter for this for a while, sorry! Still, I hope you like it.
> 
> I think the best explanation for this chapter is that I really, really love internal reveals. I love sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting for the bomb to drop, for the other characters to find out what the audience has known all along. The thing I found most disappointing about season one is how many of those happened offscreen (specifically between 1x09 and 1x10), and one of my favourite scenes in season two is when everyone finds out exactly what Aramis did with the Queen (and not only because of Athos's quiet smugness at what's basically telling tales on his brother to his dad). So, yeah. Have an awkward reveal scene!

She can feel the thrill racing through her blood as she tracks her prey. The knife in her hand is cool, but warming against her skin. There’s something alive about weapons, she’s always thought, the way they feel when you use them, the sounds they make and the ones you can almost imagine them making too. A gunshot like a roar, a sword thrust like a scream, and the whisper of a dagger in the darkness like a prayer.

She walks the streets of Paris with the confidence of someone born in them, but today she doesn’t walk to be seen or noticed. She lets the flow of people hide her, moving when they move so that she doesn’t stand out as a rock in the current, shifting to hidden spots and stilling when there are no crowds to lose herself in.

Her prey is relatively slow-moving. She’s been following him since he left the Louvre, and will get him long before he reaches his destination. He’s glanced back twice already, but she doesn’t think he’s seen her either time, too absorbed in his thoughts. She’ll catch him shortly. 

Then he turns into an alleyway. She has to put on speed to catch him, and when she reaches the alleyway it turns out he’s been waiting for her, leaning against the wall, and he grabs her and twists them so she’s the one pushed up against it. However, she was prepared for this, and manages to slide quickly out of his grasp and to the side, holding the knife several inches from his throat. She uses it to force him back against the wall in her place.

“Always a pleasure,” Athos murmurs, face splitting into a wry smile.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you,” she says in her sultriest voice, leaning in close and nipping at the spot just below his ear. She still holds the knife in a faux threatening pose, though. She can feel her heartbeat racing from the high of tailing him, and she can see his pulse thrumming hard in his neck. She would like to bite it as well, so she does.

“I’d bleed quite a lot,” Athos says. “And that’s your favourite dress.”

“An excellent point, m’sieur.”

“Oh, I think I have an even better one,” he says, still in that polite tone. “Look down.”

She glances down and arches an eyebrow. While she has her knife at his throat, he has one pressed lightly against the boning of her corset. “Well done,” she says, genuinely impressed. Knives are not Athos’s specialty, after all. And to palm one without her noticing – well, he’s getting better at this. 

“Did you let me spot you this time?” he demands to know.

“Now, why would I do that? Simply because you lost every other time,” she says with mock sympathy. “Your knees must be sore from all the forfeits you’ve had to pay. But then, you’ve seemed to enjoy it so much I was starting to wonder if you were losing on purpose.”

“So is this a tie, then?” he wonders.

“Hmm.” She licks her lips thoughtfully, examines him. “If we’re both to pay a forfeit, I have no problems going first.” She goes to kneel, but he grips her arm and keeps her upright. “What? You suddenly have a problem screwing in alleyways?”

“My last memory of you kneeling in the street is not a good one,” he says in a low voice.

She moves the knife she’s holding so its tip rests at the base of his neck, tracing it idly downwards so that it leaves a little white scratch and begins to drag the collar of his shirt down, revealing a few inches of chest, and gives him a smile that’s all promise. “Well, allow me to rewrite that memory with a truly mind-blowing one. Or _something_ blowing, at least.”

There is the sudden noise of loud, racing footsteps, and Milady has Athos’s pistol off his belt and ready to fire by the time d’Artagnan’s standing at the mouth of the alley. He’s holding his own, pointed right at her. “Lower it,” he says threateningly, utter fury in his thin face, “And the knife.” Then he looks over at Athos, broadcasting worry. “Are you alright?”

“What are doing here?” Athos asks, letting his head drop back against the wall with a dull thud. “You and Porthos are not due back until tomorrow.”

“We finished early,” d’Artagnan says, looking confused by Athos’s reaction. Then his anger rises again as he returns his gaze to Milady. She can see his finger tighten, ready to fire at her slightest move.

Milady opens her mouth to make a remark about finishing early being entirely in character for him, but restrains herself – as enjoyable as Athos’s jealousy can be, this situation doesn’t need any more overheated emotions. D’Artagnan looks like he’s got enough for all of them.

“I noticed her sneaking about, and then when she didn’t come out of the alley…” d’Artagnan explains, trailing off and shaking his head like he can’t believe Milady’s wholly predictable treacherousness. He gestures with the pistol towards her again, looking like he’ll take any excuse to fire. “Lower them, I said. In fact, drop them.”

She rolls her eyes at him, but does lower the pistol. The knife she keeps where it is. “It’s worth considering the idea that you may have misread this situation.”

“You have a _knife_ to Athos’s throat,” d’Artagnan reminds her angrily. He glances at Athos, and confusion muddies his expression again. “And he has one to your… chest.”

“Yes, but we both consented,” Milady drawls, “Enthusiastically, in fact,” and Athos closes his eyes as if to block out this entire situation. Since the mood is clearly dead – for the moment, at least, she’s sure she can revive it later – she finally stows her knife again and moves back. Athos puts away his knife as well with an almost inaudible sigh, keeping his eyes shut.

“Lower yours as well, d’Artagnan,” Athos says, no emotion in his voice but tiredness. “Now.”

Porthos shows up behind d’Artagnan. “Evening,” he says, in his good-natured way. “So, do I get five sous or not?”

D’Artagnan finally lowers his pistol a few degrees, apparently realising the situation isn’t as simple as he thought. “I didn’t agree to that bet.”

“When he started chasing after you, I bet it was a bad idea,” Porthos says to Milady. “Judging by Athos’s expression, I think I was right. Got some news you two want to share with us?”

Milady glances at Athos and waits. After a very long moment, he opens his eyes, straightens his head off the wall to look at Porthos, and says dryly, “We’ve decided to try the whole ‘wedded bliss’ thing again.”

“A Parisian alleyway wouldn’t be my first choice for a honeymoon location, but you look like you’re making the best of it,” Porthos comments, not looking at all surprised.

“You’re… what?” D’Artagnan stares at Athos open-mouthed, then shifts his gaze to Porthos, looking almost as betrayed by him. “You knew about this?”

“Knew it was a possibility,” Porthos says. “And then one of the recruits told me about having to stow a bunch of cases in the Captain’s rooms, and it seemed likely he’d brought her back with him. I was just waiting to have an actual conversation.”

“I was planning to tell you tomorrow,” Athos says. “Preferably not in an alleyway.”

“What, she helps us once and you just – you just decided that’s fair recompense for all her other acts?” D’Artagnan’s face is flushed with outrage, all offended righteousness, but there’s some hurt in the mix as well. “The crimes she’s committed, against you, against _us_ , the lives she’s taken?”

“D’Artagnan -”

“No! Recent events change nothing. She’s still the same manipulative, cold-blooded killer as before. One good deed – a good deed she was paid handsomely for, I might add – and you think you want her back in your life? Don’t you worry she’ll be the death of you? _Again?_ She’s poison.”

“If I am, I’m sure he’s tasted me enough to acquire an immunity,” Milady says, his words pricking her into real annoyance. She’s trying so hard to change, but in d’Artagnan’s eyes, she’ll always be the woman who gives bloody daggers and death sentences, won’t she? This is why she wanted a fresh start, one where she could be a fresh person, unencumbered by the mistakes of her past. 

He makes a little noise of revulsion.

Because of her irritation with him, she doesn’t know if she’s trying to really assuage d’Artagnan’s fears or simply mock him for them, and her continued reply contains elements of both desires. “In any case, perhaps I’m not so poisonous as you believe. There’s only one kind of death he risks in my bed, and I promise it’s not that final – after all, that would leave little chance of reciprocation. He can rest his head quite safely beside mine.”

“As well sleep with a snake!” d’Artagnan snaps. What was it he said last time? A polecat, wasn’t it? She wonders idly if this is an improvement or not. She’s been known to bite as well as scratch, so neither are entirely inaccurate, she supposes, but they still rankle. She can see Athos gearing up to speak, probably to tell d’Artagnan that he’s said enough, or that they should talk in private.

“Well, he’s been sleeping with this particular snake for many months now, and I assure you he’s begged for every bite,” she drawls anyway, unable to resist, although the look Athos gives her isn’t a happy one.

“You’re disgusting,” d’Artagnan shoots back, and then awareness dawns. “Wait, months? Athos, you haven’t been – when she was the King’s mistress -”

There is an appalled silence, d’Artagnan staring at her, then at Athos, horror plain in his face. Porthos chokes on a surprised laugh. Athos just sighs. “Anne, could you please not rile him further? And d’Artagnan, that’s enough. I accept that my choices affect you, but they are still _my_ choices, it is still _my_ life, and any issues you have can be expressed less offensively. And not in public, preferably.”

D’Artagnan grits his teeth and paces the length of the street in a few quick strides, then back again, as if he’s trying to bleed off some of his excess fury through exercise. Eventually he crosses his arms and leans against a wall in an unconscious imitation of Athos at his most irritated, though he can’t quite manage the disdainful, aristocratic expression Athos usually wears, and Milady doubts he’ll be able to achieve the same terse and sardonic witticisms that Athos employs either.

“Maybe we should talk at the Garrison,” Porthos suggests, because it’s clear to all of them that d’Artagnan is on the verge of continuing to speak his mind, and this is hardly the best place to do it. “Your office?”

“Not very thick walls,” Milady says, in the tones of someone who has discovered this firsthand. “There’s an inn around the corner, though, and it’s early enough that we’ll probably get some privacy. We can grab a drink as well. Or you can, and I can -”

“Please stay,” Athos says, and it’s all he needs to say, because his glance makes it clear this is a request and not an attempt to order her.

“Bit short of cash,” Porthos says cheerfully as they sit down at a table in the tavern, giving Athos a meaningful look.

“Drinks are on me,” Athos says with another sigh, divining Porthos’s meaning immediately. “One moment.”

It occurs to Milady a second later that this has left her alone with the both of them, and that she really wishes it hadn’t. “I hear you’re married now to the draper’s widow,” she drawls, to forestall whatever insult d’Artagnan’s planning to throw at her next. “Congratulations. How’s that going for you?”

“Wonderfully. We’ve made no attempts on each other’s lives, so I can only suppose my marriage must be more successful than yours.” At least he’s not yelling, now, but his teeth are still gritted, and he still looks like he’d like to draw his gun on her again.

“More successful, or less interesting?” she wonders, and has the satisfaction of seeing his face darken even further with fury.

“So what are you planning to do now you’re back in Paris?” d’Artagnan practically spits the words. “Going to return to your old line of work? Poison a few more foreign ministers?” 

“Why, is there one you’d like poisoned?” she asks. “I doubt you could afford my services. As a matter of fact, though, I was thinking of dealing information. Did you know that there are quite powerful groups in Paris who still cannot manage to find out the simplest of facts? I mean, have you heard the rumours the King’s previous First Minister was a spy? Now that’s the kind of thing you’d think someone would notice.”

“You’re planning to make a living selling intelligence?” Porthos asks, raising his eyebrows. “I ‘spose a few deals like the last one would set you up. Information from you doesn’t seem to come cheap.”

“Oh, I set quite a high price for _anything_ I sell,” she says, smirk playing around her mouth. Porthos seems much more willing to talk civilly than d’Artagnan is, so it’s something of a relief to switch her attention to him. “If Athos was paying in _coin_ , I daresay he’d be bankrupt already.”

“Our Athos is good at… negotiation, then?” Porthos says, catching the undisguised innuendo immediately and raising his eyebrows in amusement. “Well done him.”

“I’d call him an excellent negotiator,” she says insinuatingly, entering into the spirit of this. She thinks she could learn to like Porthos. “I don’t know if he has a silver tongue, exactly, but he certainly has a skilful one.”

“That, I didn’t need to know,” d’Artagnan says, wincing in mild disgust again. He gives her a scornful look that makes it clear he can’t imagine what Athos is thinking.

Porthos grins, looking far too entertained by d’Artagnan’s discomfort, and she warms to him further. “I could stand to hear a little more.”

“Careful, or I’ll start to think you prefer the key to the hole yourself,” she drawls.

“I paid the innkeeper to keep them coming,” Athos says, entering the room juggling both wine and cups, looking both harassed and concerned. His lips shape a silent apology to her, and she forgives him for abandoning her for a minute.

“I’d prefer to speak in private, Captain,” d’Artagnan says, voice chilly. He stands and crosses his arms. “They have rooms here, I understand.”

“Perhaps I accused the wrong man of having designs on my husband,” Milady says in an undertone, grabbing one of the bottles and opening it easily. Porthos takes a cup, still looking amused.

“I suppose a mind like yours _would_ jump to perversity, Milady,” d’Artagnan snaps, her name sounding like the accusation he always tries to make it into. “After all, concepts like friendship or brotherhood are probably -” but Athos raises his eyebrows at him and he falls silent, glowering at the wall.

Athos looks at Porthos, who thinks for a moment, shakes his head, and fills his cup from the nearest bottle. Apparently he’s fine staying here. Athos looks at her and she shrugs, looking as unbothered as possible, not about to willingly leave the wine when she’s feeling the lack of it right now. Athos gestures at d’Artagnan and the younger man follows, still practically vibrating with anger.

After the two of them disappear, Porthos looks at her and says, “Better to leave them to it, yeah?”

“If you say so,” she says, and steals the wine Athos set in front of d’Artagnan’s chair as well, downing a fair amount of the bottle and pouring the rest into a cup, which earns an impressed look from Porthos. She returns the empty bottle to d’Artagnan’s space to await his return because she’s generous like that.

He tilts his head and looks at her. “About what we just got in the way of…”

“Coitus interruptus doesn’t usually involve a pistol, you know. And you are _far_ too interested in our sex life, Musketeer.”

“I don’t think that was entirely about sex. Least, not for you.”

She arches an eyebrow at him. “Oh? You think I enjoyed pretending to try and kill Athos? I’ll admit there was a bit of a thrill to it, but then, my interests are both diverse and perverse, anyone will tell you that. I expect d’Artagnan’s yelling words to that effect right now.”

“Yeah?” Porthos drinks, staring at her thoughtfully over the top of his glass. “I don’t think it’s about wanting to kill him either. Wanna know what I think? I think the last Captain of the Musketeers got shot in the back. I think you’re trying to make sure this one doesn’t.”

She blinks, wrongfooted by this. She never expects Athos’s friends to show insight, and on the rare occasions they do, it shocks her out of her smugness.

“Thought so,” Porthos says. He puts his drink down. “Y’know, I don’t think wives are supposed to try and train their husbands.”

“I can tell _you’ve_ never been married.”

“Fair enough,” he says, giving her another of those easy-going smiles. “Still, if you’re gonna teach him how to avoid tails and assassins, maybe clue him in that’s what you’re doing. Athos doesn’t like being played.”

“Don’t have to tell me that,” she says dismissively. It’s an effort not to automatically slip back into her old accent with him using a similar one, and once she does that, she’ll fall into cant as well, she knows. It took her _years_ to pretty up her speech to the point she could pretend to be respectable, and longer still for speaking like that to feel natural, so she hates falling back into her old way of talking.

“Apparently I do. You know, you don’t have to worry so much. We’ll always watch his back.”

“Like you watched his back when I worked for the Cardinal?” she asks. She knows her voice has hardened, and forces herself to return to her previous light and indifferent tone again. “I could’ve put a knife in his back dozens of times, you know. I nearly _did_. He really is very careless when it comes to his life.”

“I reckon he’s got more to live for now,” Porthos comments. He gives her a slow smile, that holds more approval than she was expecting. “But another person watching his back can’t hurt, especially since we’ve lost one.” His smile dims a bit and he looks into his cup with a sigh.

She tries to smile as well, but knows it comes out awkward and painful. Porthos might approve of her, but it’s based on false premises. She’s not like them. She doesn’t want Athos to live because of some pure, redeeming love for him that’s turned her into a better person, or because she wants what’s best for him – she wants him to live because she needs him. She’s always needed him, the bastard. If he dies, what will she do? Who will she be? She can’t feel that emptiness inside her again, like she did when she thought d’Artagnan had shot him, when she believed she’d finally gotten her revenge. Her love’s a selfish, greedy thing, and she needs him alive, because without him, half of her is missing, and she’s too self-centred to want to suffer that kind of pain.

A better, nobler kind of love would probably have her care for the things he cares for, understand the duty and honour that drives him, find some of her own. That’s not the kind of love she has for him. Oh, she’ll help if she can to make him happy, but she’s not the kind of person who believes in self-sacrifice – and what are duty and honour, besides an irrational desire to give up your own happiness and that of those around you for some ill-defined and inconsistent ideal? There are only two things in the world she cares for, herself and Athos, and there’s no ideal worth losing either. She’ll be fine if the Musketeers are shamed and dismantled, if Louis and the monarchy are brought down in flames, if France becomes a territory of Spain. She’ll even be fine if the whole country burns to the fucking ground, in fact, provided Athos survives. She needs him to survive. The rest of the world is acceptable losses. 

“So, what, you don’t have any problems with Athos letting me back into his life?” she asks finally, giving him a slightly mocking smile. “None at all?”

“Like he said, it’s his life,” Porthos says. “Long as you don’t actually kill him, we can pick him up if you wreck him again. After all,” he pauses and studies her, and now she can see the sharp intelligence behind those brown eyes, “We did last time.” 

“Oh, really?” she drawls, swirling her drink. “Good job.”

“Hmm,” he says, instead of hitting back. It could mean anything, and his face is inscrutable, so she just watches and waits. After a long moment, he pulls out a pack of cards. “Want a game? They could be a while.”

She stares at him, then sighs. “Why not.”

He cheats well enough to be a card sharp, but she hasn’t lost a game since she was old enough to realise the cards had nothing to do with who won. She could call him on the aces up his sleeve just as easily as she calls his bluffs, but it’s far more entertaining to fight fire with fire, so by the third hand every single set of cards they lay down is ridiculously improbable. 

“Four kings,” he says some time later, staring at her hand and giving her a slight, amused smile. “Again. Seems unlikely.”

“You had four kings two hands ago, if I recall correctly,” she says, giving him her most innocent look. “And five hands ago as well. It seems to be the most common set of cards in this game.”

“Yeah. Lucky, that,” he says, shaking his head in apparent wonderment at his bizarre good fortune. 

She looks at him and can’t help her smile. Maybe not all of Athos’s friends are complete fools. “If you always play like this, I can’t imagine how you’ve survived to such a ripe old age.”

“Good friends,” he says cheerfully. “And quick reflexes. You?”

Before she can answer, d’Artagnan storms quickly back to the table. He grabs the wine bottle in front of him and goes to drink some, clearly in desperate need of liquid refreshment after what sounded like a very intense argument, then realises it’s empty and smacks it back onto the table. Athos falls into place beside him, looking somewhere between resigned and concerned.

“Good talk?” Porthos asks.

D’Artagnan ignores him, focusing his furious glare on Milady. She sits back and quirks an eyebrow at him. “You stay the hell away from Constance,” he says fiercely. “You see her, you just walk away. Do you understand me?”

“So intimate, sisterly heart-to-hearts are out of the question, then?” Milady tilts her head slightly, letting her lips curve into a smirk. “I’m crushed, truly.”

“Stay _away_ from her, or you’ll regret it,” d’Artagnan warns her.

Athos looks at her, something like pleading in his eyes, although she doubts anyone else would be able to tell. After a moment, Milady sighs and says, “I won’t go near her.” 

There are so many mocking comments she could add to that, so many little, deep cuts she could make – d’Artagnan is a very easy target, in many ways. He’s all weak spots. Part of her wants to hit him with something just to prove that she can, to show that loving Athos hasn’t made her weak in turn, that she’s still someone worthy of caution, someone he shouldn’t be threatening. But honestly, most of her just wants this to be over now. She has no intention of talking to Constance anyway, so what does it matter? Hell, if she thought she could reasonably avoid d’Artagnan despite living with Athos, she’d never speak to him again either. Unfortunately, that’s probably impossible.

She might consider playing cards with Porthos again someday, though. Just to work on her sleight of hand skills, of course. Not because she could ever enjoy his company.

Athos walks her back to the Garrison afterwards, as has been their habit lately. Before the past few days she’d been making excuses to only return after dark, to slip into his rooms quietly without being observed, but she’s trying not to do that anymore. She’s sure some of the Musketeers have recognised the King’s former mistress by now. Sometime soon one will work up the courage to make some kind of bawdy joke about it to Athos – now won’t that be fun?

When they’re back in his quarters, Athos says, “Well, that could have gone much worse.” He’s seemed distracted by his thoughts the whole walk back, quiet, responding to her with monosyllables. It irritates her. She was having a good day before this.

“Mmm,” she agrees, and looks at him through her lashes. It feels like time to get their night back on track. “For example, they could have crashed into that alleyway just a minute later. I would have been on my knees, you would have been deep in my mouth… do you think you could have stopped when he started yelling accusations at us? With my lips wrapped tightly around your cock? Or would you have just kept going?”

He blinks and his pupils dilate, distractedness immediately disappearing. He opens his mouth as if to reply but nothing comes out.

She takes one step towards him, rolling her hips just to feel the pleasurable stretch of her own body. She can feel her pulse kick up a notch as she casually slides a hand down the front of his trousers and braies. “I think you would have kept thrusting. With my tongue tracing the length of you -” she lets her fingers tease lightly along his cock, which jumps in her grip, already hardening. “It would have been hard not to, wouldn’t it? No matter who was there.”

She teases him silence for a little while, enjoying the play of emotions across his face, the thready edge to his breathing. Her fingers play and stroke until she knows he’s aching for her. His eyes slide closed as her thumb drags across the head of his cock, gathering the pre-come there, massaging it down the length of him. He lets his breath out in a shuddering sigh of need.

She decides it’s time to start talking again. “I can picture it, can’t you? Your friends standing there, horrified and appalled, while I suck you as deep as I can, take you apart with just my mouth.” Now she pumps him in shallow, light strokes and his hips judder against her, chasing more friction, more pressure than what’s she’s willing to provide. “Me on my knees in the street like a whore, and you bucking against my mouth helplessly, right on the edge, unable to control yourself, unable to pull away, unable to stop. Not very captain-ly.”

“My God,” he gasps out, hips juddering as she twists her hand playfully. He thrusts against her impatiently, cock sliding inside the loose circle of her fist, and she loosens her grip further just to torment him. Whatever he was planning to say after the blasphemy, it’s replaced by something that sounds almost like a whimper.

“Not quite,” she says, stretching up to kiss him very lightly on his cheek, in what would be a very genteel, proper gesture of affection between a gentleman and his wife if she wasn’t toying with his cock at the same time. “Though you’ve spent enough time worshipping me on your knees that I can understand the confusion.”

“And I thought your plan was to be the one on your knees tonight,” he manages to say, trembling against her.

“That was when I was prepared to generously grant you an unearned victory,” she gives him a smile that’s all sharp teeth. “I’m not feeling quite so generous anymore. After all, I’ve already given quite a few concessions tonight, haven’t I? I hardly insulted your friends at all.” 

“Your self control is truly a thing of wonder. If you want me to show my appreciation -” he breaks off with a groan as she squeezes him again, but pulls himself together enough to finish saying, less sarcastically, “You have only to say the word.”

She extricates her hand from his pants and leans into him, enjoying the firmness of his body against her. Lust squirms in her lower belly. “It seems silly for either of us to get sore knees when we have a perfectly serviceable bed within reach, really.”

“You got there ahead of me,” he says, then gives her a half-smirk. He lets his hands rest on her hips, settling her more fully against his hardness, and she knows at some point in the near future he’s going to make her pay for her teasing. The thought makes her shiver. “But then, you usually do.”

She gives him a pinch for _that_ comment. “Is that a challenge? You must remember how the last competition like that ended.”

“Very well for both of us, I recall,” he says. He moves her gently away from him by her hips, and as she watches, walks over and falls backwards onto their bed. He leans his head on one arm, surveying her with hooded eyes, a slight smile twisting his lips as he waits for her to come to him. “But you were right earlier, when you said today was a tie. We both owe each other. Then again, I lost track of our debts a long time ago. Why don’t you come over here and we can make a start on paying them?”

She shrugs with a smile and moves forward, pulling herself up onto the bed to straddle him, but instead he directs her so that in moments she’s straddling his face instead, weight on her legs, held only a few inches above his lips. His whole upper half is hidden by a sea of skirts, and she’s facing towards his cock, perfectly positioned to lean over and pay her forfeit as he pays his. An excellent solution to the question of who should go first.

She can feel his hot breath against her inner thighs and shudders with want, a low whine already escaping her just at that. A chuckle shakes his body in response, and he blows deliberately against her clit, making her jerk. Athos falls into smugness far too easily these days, she thinks dizzily. Simply because he can drive her wild with his slightest touch or even just with his voice or expression, that’s no reason to be so self-assured.

Milady forces herself to concentrate, to free him from his pants, to trace the head of his cock with her tongue, lick up and down his length slowly. Her concentration shatters immediately, though, as at her first touch he pulls her down further so she’s sitting fully on his face, spread wide and open, helpless against his clever, ever-moving mouth. She has no idea how he can breath when he’s buried in her skirts, crushed by her weight, and half-smothered by her cunt, but it’s hard to care as she rocks unsteadily against him, his tongue hard and fervent on her clit, his hands directing her movement. It’s so wonderful, she has to return the feeling, and she can’t hold back, so in one smooth movement she swallows him whole.

She moans around his cock as she takes him deep in her mouth, and feels his corresponding moan against her cunt at the sensation. His little groans and gasps make his mouth and tongue shudder against her in a way that’s so unbelievably incredible it’s sinful, and the heat in her blood rises steadily every time she provokes one. From the way his hips ride up helplessly every time she whimpers around him, the experience is clearly mutual. It’s hard to keep up a rhythm with him distracting her so thoroughly, so instead of working him with her usual expertise she falls back on pure instinct and need, slanting her mouth over him, licking at him hungrily, pulling back to suck at the head and swirl her tongue around it, then inching down to swallow him to the root. She leans precariously on one hand and brings the other up to his balls to play with them as she takes him deep once more, forcing another gasp out of him.

Athos always uses his tongue against her like he’s been starving for the taste of her, every touch and lick so urgent and intense that he can drive her wild in moments, but he also always surprises her, changing rhythms, changing pressure, changing angles, searching for _more_. It’s never enough for him just to bring her off, he always has to wring more pleasure out of her each time, always has to push her further, shatter her more completely. She thinks sometimes that he’s spent as much energy studying her as any sword drill, and has put more diligence and devotion into learning the use of her. He puts that knowledge into work now, moving his tongue against her clit, running it up the length of her slit, using his grip on her to angle her perfectly so he can delve inside her and hit the spot that makes her jolt against him mindlessly.

But she’s no blushing ingenue – in fact, she’s done this professionally, if you want to get technical, although everything she did then certainly lacked this delirious, delighted insanity of lust and love and need, so perhaps that experience helps her little here. Still, he’s not the only one who likes to continually better their performance, or the only one who can play the other’s body like a piano, and she puts her pleasurably-gained knowledge of every kink and quirk of his desire into play. She varies the amount of suction, the depth, the angle, she uses her tongue, her lips, gives him her throat, her hands, even her teeth, she lets every moan or whimper he draws out of her with his clever mouth vibrate down the length of him, and then with a twist of her wrist and a bob of head he’s jerking up against her with a hoarse cry, spilling into her mouth, and she swallows down the taste of him and twitches her lower body against his mouth at the same time, ridiculously aroused.

He gasps out his orgasm against her cunt, and then redoubles his efforts, mouth working overtime, tongue exploring every bit of her, forceful and assured. Now that he’s come he can concentrate fully on her and the feeling is electric. It hardly takes any time at all before she is grinding down against him, eyes slamming closed, mouth dropping open, hoarse cries erupting out of her, his tongue working her and working her, forcing her over the edge into unimaginable pleasure.

Afterwards she moves herself off his face, squirming around on the bed until their feet are at the same end again, so that she’s lying half-on him, arm flung over him. She kisses him lazily, tasting her come, and his come, and the mingling of both tastes together in their mouths. It’s obscene and it should be disgusting, and she wants to taste it forever, taste them forever. “I suppose it’s good they know,” she says, pulling away finally and smirking at him. “The walls here aren’t as bad as your office, but they’re still not exactly thick, so I suspect they would have eventually found out one way or another.”

Neither are in rooms that close, but the gossip must be spreading through the Garrison already, she thinks. It’s probably only the other Musketeers’ awe of the Inseparables that kept d’Artagnan and Porthos in relative ignorance. They have not, after all, been quiet, for all she’s spent weeks sneaking in and out. She considers it now – all these poor, lonely Musketeers around them, listening every night to the rhythmic creaking of their bed, to endless sighs, moans, screams, pleas, and raw, earthy cries. She wonders if they take themselves in hand to the sound of Athos driving her repeatedly to ecstasy – she’s unsure if she should be titillated by the idea or disgusted, but when she considers it, decides instead she’s simply amused. Perhaps in time they’ll learn something. Of course, if they’re brave enough to mention it to Athos, they’ll probably learn an entirely different lesson.

“Years of every Musketeer believing my only immoral inclinations were towards a bottle, and in only a couple of weeks, you’ve managed to convince every man within ten rooms of us that I’m a hopeless libertine,” he says ruefully, his own thoughts seemingly travelling similar roads. “Talking of being un-captain-ly…”

“What, are you suggesting we should fuck less, or just fuck quieter?” she nips at his neck and hooks a leg over his, already considering what to do next. It will be a little while before Athos is recovered enough to take her properly, but only a little while. And he has his fingers and his mouth, so she’s sure they can pass the time until he’s ready to do more pleasurably enough. To start with, they should at least work on removing their clothes. It’s been hours since his naked body was last at her mercy. “I strongly object to either suggestion.”

“You’re insatiable,” he informs her as she rucks her dress up and slots herself against him so that her wetness is against his thigh. She moves up to kiss him again. He slides his hand up her side, following her curves, to rest on her back, bracing her against him.

“I am.”

He smiles at her, so honestly happy it makes her chest tighten for a moment. “Thank God.”

“Again with God,” she says, already feeling her heartbeat start to pick up again, her body starting to hum with desire as she rocks a little against his still-clothed leg, slicking it with her need. “I’d much rather you thanked me.”

He does.


End file.
